This Is How You Lose Her (15 page)

What about Kimathi?

She doesn’t get it. Who?

Your Kenyan. You can’t bring yourself to say
boyfriend
.

He threw me out. He knows it’s not his. She picks at something on her sweater. I’m going to unpack, OK? You nod and watch her. She is an exceptionally beautiful girl. You think of that old saying
Show me a beautiful girl and I’ll show you someone who is tired of fucking her
. You doubt you would have ever tired of her, though.

But it could be his, right?

It’s yours, OK? she cries. I know you don’t want it to be yours but it’s yours.

You are surprised at how hollowed out you feel. You don’t know if you should show enthusiasm or support. You run your hand over the thinning stubble on your head.

I need to stay here, she tells you later, after the two of you fumble through an awkward fuck. I have nowhere to go. I can’t go back to my family.

When you tell Elvis the whole story you expect him to flip out, to order you to kick her out. You fear his reaction because you know you don’t have the heart to kick her out.

But Elvis doesn’t flip. He slaps you on the back, beams delightedly. That’s great, cuz.

What do you mean, That’s great
?

You’re going to be a father. You’re going to have a son.

A son? What are you talking about? There’s not even proof that it’s mine.

Elvis is not listening. He’s smiling at some inner thought. He checks to make sure the wife is not anywhere in earshot. Remember the last time we went to the DR?

Of course you do. Three years ago. Everybody had a blast except for you. You were in the middle of the great downturn, which meant you spent most of your time alone, floating on your back in the ocean or getting drunk at the bar or walking the beach in the early morning before anybody was up.

What about it?

Well, I got a girl pregnant while we were down there.

Are you fucking kidding me?

He nods.

Pregnant?

He nods again.

Did she have it?

He rummages through his cell phone. Shows you a picture of a perfect little boy with the most Dominican little face you ever done saw.

That’s my son, Elvis says proudly. Elvis Xavier Junior.

Dude, are you fucking
serious
with this? If your wife finds—

He bridles. She ain’t going to find out.

You sit on it for a bit. You’re posted up behind his house, near Central Square. In summer these blocks are ill with activity but today you can actually hear a jay chivvying some other birds.

Babies are fucking expensive. Elvis punches you in the arm. So just get ready, buster, to be broke as a joke.

Back at the apartment the law student has taken over two of your closets and almost your entire sink and most crucially she has laid claim to the bed. She has put a pillow and a sheet on the couch. For you.

What, am I not allowed to share the bed with you?

I don’t think it’s good for me, she says. It would be too stressful. I don’t want to miscarry.

Hard to argue against that. Your back doesn’t take to the couch at all, so now you wake up in the morning in more pain than ever.

Only a bitch of color comes to Harvard to get pregnant. White women don’t do that. Asian women don’t do that. Only fucking black and Latina women. Why go to all the trouble to get into Harvard just to get knocked up? You could have stayed on the block and done that shit.

This is what you write in your journal. The next day when you return from classes the law student throws the notebook in your face. I fucking
hate
you
, she wails. I
hope
it’s not yours. I
hope
it
is
yours and it’s born
retarded.

How can you say that? you demand. How can you say something like that?

She walks to the kitchen and starts to pour herself a shot and you find yourself pulling the bottle out of her hand and pouring its contents into the sink. This is ridiculous, you say. More bad TV.

She doesn’t speak to you again for two whole fucking weeks. You spend as much time as you can either at your office or over at Elvis’s house. Whenever you enter a room she snaps shut her laptop. I’m not fucking snooping, you say. But she waits for you to move on before she returns to typing whatever she was typing.

You can’t throw out your baby’s mom, Elvis reminds you. It would fuck that kid up for life. Plus, it’s bad karma. Just wait till the baby comes. She’ll fucking straighten out.

A month passes, two months pass. You’re afraid to tell anybody else, to share the—what? Good news? Arlenny you know would march right in and boot her ass out on the street. Your back is agony and the numbness in your arms is starting to become pretty steady. In the shower, the only place in the apartment you can be alone, you whisper to yourself:
Hell, Netley. We’re in Hell.

—

L
ATER IT WILL
all come back to you as a terrible fever dream but at the time it moved so very slowly, felt so very concrete. You take her to her appointments. You help her with the vitamins and shit. You pay for almost everything. She is not speaking to her mother so all she has are two friends who are in the apartment almost as much as you are. They are all part of the Biracial Identity Crisis Support Group and look at you with little warmth. You wait for her to melt, but she keeps her distance. Some days while she is sleeping and you are trying to work you allow yourself the indulgence of wondering what kind of child you will have. Whether it will be a boy or a girl, smart or withdrawn. Like you or like her.

Have you thought up any names? Elvis’s wife asks.

Not yet.

Taína for a girl, she suggests. And Elvis for a boy. She throws a taunting glance at her husband and laughs.

I like my name, Elvis says. I would give it to a boy.

Over my dead body, his wife says. And besides, this oven is closed for business.

At night while you’re trying to sleep you see the glow of her computer through the open door of the bedroom, hear her fingers on the keyboard.

Do you need anything?

I’m fine, thank you.

You come to the door a few times and watch her, wanting to be called in, but she always glares and asks you, What the fuck do you want?

Just checking.

Five month, six month, seventh month. You are in class teaching Intro to Fiction when you get a text from one of her girlfriends saying she has gone into labor, six weeks early. All sorts of terrible fears race around inside of you. You keep trying her cell phone but she doesn’t answer. You call Elvis but he doesn’t answer either, so you drive over to the hospital by yourself.

Are you the father? the woman at the desk asks.

I am, you say diffidently.

You are led around the corridors and finally given some scrubs and told to wash your hands and given instructions where you should stand and warned about the procedure but as soon as you walk into the birthing room the law student shrieks:
I don’t want him in here. I don’t want him in here
.
He’s not the father.

You didn’t think anything could hurt so bad. Her two girlfriends rush at you but you have already exited. You saw her thin ashy legs and the doctor’s back and little else. You’re glad you didn’t see anything more. You would have felt like you’d violated her safety or something. You take off the scrubs; you wait around for a bit and then you realize what you’re doing and finally you drive home.

—

Y
OU DON’T HEAR
from her but from her girlfriend, the same one who texted you about the labor. I’ll come pick up her bags, OK? When she arrives, she glances around the apartment warily. You’re not going to go psycho on me, are you?

No, I’m not. After a pause you demand: Why would you say that? I’ve never hurt a woman in my life. Then you realize how you sound—like a dude who hurts women all the time. Everything goes back into the three suitcases and then you help her wrestle them down to her SUV.

You must be relieved, she says.

You don’t answer.

And that’s the end of it. Later you hear that the Kenyan visited her in the hospital, and when he saw the baby a teary reconciliation occurred, all was forgiven.

That was your mistake, Elvis said. You should have had a baby with that ex of yours. Then she wouldn’t have left you.

She would have left you, Arlenny says. Believe it.

The rest of the semester ends up being a super-duper clusterfuck. Lowest evaluations in your six years as a professor. Your only student of color for that semester writes: He claims that we don’t know anything but doesn’t show us any way to address these deficiencies. One night you call your ex and when the voice mail clicks on you say: We should have had a kid. And then you hang up, ashamed. Why did you say that? you ask yourself. Now she’ll definitely never speak to you again.

I don’t think the phone call is the problem, Arlenny says.

Check it out. Elvis produces a picture of Elvis Jr. holding a bat. This kid is going to be a monster.

On winter break you fly to the DR with Elvis. What the hell else are you going to do? You ain’t got shit going on, outside of waving your arms around every time they go numb.

Elvis is beyond excited. He has three suitcases of shit for the boy, including his first glove, his first ball, his first Bosox jersey. About eighty kilos of clothes and shit for the baby mama. Hid them all in your apartment, too. You are at his house when he bids his wife and mother-in-law and daughter goodbye. His daughter doesn’t seem to understand what’s happening but when the door shuts she lets out a wail that coils about you like constantine wire. Elvis stays cool as fuck. This used to be me, you’re thinking. Me me me.

Of course you look for her on the flight. You can’t help yourself.

You assume that the baby mama will live somewhere poor like Capotillo or Los Alcarrizos but you didn’t imagine she would live in the Nadalands. You’ve been to the Nadalands a couple of times before; shit, your family came up out of those spaces. Squatter chawls where there are no roads, no lights, no running water, no grid, no anything, where everybody’s slapdash house is on top of everybody else’s, where it’s all mud and shanties and motos and grind and thin smiling motherfuckers everywhere without end, like falling off the rim of civilization. You have to leave the rental jípeta on the last bit of paved road and jump on the back of motoconchos with all the luggage balanced on your backs. Nobody stares because those ain’t real loads you’re carrying: You’ve seen a single moto carry a family of five and their pig.

You finally pull up to a tiny little house and out comes Baby Mama—cue happy homecoming. You wish you could say you remember Baby Mama from that long-ago trip, but you do not. She is tall and very thick, exactly how Elvis always likes them. She is no older than twenty-one, twenty-two, with an irresistible Georgina Duluc smile, and when she sees you she gives you a huge abrazo. So the padrino finally decides to visit, she declaims in one of those loud ronca campesina voices. You also meet her mother, her grandmother, her brother, her sister, her three uncles. Seems like everybody is missing teeth.

Elvis picks up the boy. Mi hijo, he sings. Mi hijo.

The boy starts crying.

Baby Mama’s place is barely two rooms, one bed, one chair, a little table, a single bulb overhead. More mosquitoes than a refugee camp. Raw sewage in the back. You look at Elvis like what the fuck. The few family fotos hanging on the walls are water-stained. When it rains—Baby Mama lifts up her hands —everything goes.

Don’t worry, Elvis says, I’m moving them out this month, if I can get the loot together.

The happy couple leaves you with the family and Elvis Jr. while they visit various negocios to settle accounts and to pick up some necessaries. Baby Mama also wants to show off Elvis, natch.

You sit on a plastic chair in front of the house with the kid in your lap. The neighbors admire you with cheerful avidity. A domino game breaks out and you team up with Baby Mama’s brooding brother. Takes him less than five seconds to talk you into ordering a couple of grandes and a bottle of Brugal from the nearby colmado. Also three boxes of cigarettes, a tube of salami, and some cough syrup for a neighbor lady with a congested daughter. Ta muy mal, she says. Of course everybody has a sister or a prima they want you to meet. Que tan mas buena que el Diablo, they guarantee. You all barely finish the first bottle of romo before some of the sisters and primas actually start coming around. They look rough but you got to give it to them for trying. You invite them all to sit down, order more beer and some bad pica pollo.

Just let me know which one you like, a neighbor whispers, and I’ll make it happen.

Elvis Jr. watches you with considerable gravitas. He is a piercingly cute carajito. He has all these mosquito bites on his legs and an old scab on his head no one can explain to you. You are suddenly overcome with the urge to cover him with your arms, with your whole body.

Later, Elvis Sr. fills you in on the Plan. I’ll bring him over to the States in a few years. I’ll tell the wife he was an accident, a one-time thing when I was drunk and I didn’t find out about it until now.

And that’s going to work?

It will work out, he says testily.

Bro, your wife ain’t going to buy that.

And what the fuck do you know? Elvis says. It ain’t like your shit ever works.

Can’t argue with that. By this point your arms are killing you so you pick up the boy in order to put circulation back in them. You look into his eyes. He looks into yours. He seems preternaturally sapient. MIT-bound, you say, while you nuzzle his peppercorn hair. He starts to bawl then and you put him down, watch him run around a while.

That’s more or less when you know.

The second story of the house is unfinished, rebar poking out of the cinderblock like horrible gnarled follicles, and you and Elvis stand up there and drink beers and stare out beyond the edge of the city, beyond the vast radio dish antennas in the distance, out toward the mountains of the Cibao, the Cordillera Central, where your father was born and where your ex’s whole family is from. It’s breathtaking.