When Tito Loved Clara (21 page)

“There's nothing wrong with you,” he said, but she was already closing the door and on her way.

He went back to work, too. At Melissa's, he let himself in and went straight to the library. Most days she was in the kitchen or the
living room, reading the
Times,
sometimes checking her e-mail on a laptop, though he always felt that what she was actually doing was waiting for him. Usually, she would stop what she was doing and offer a cup of coffee from a freshly brewed pot. Thomas frequently wondered whether she'd shown Stephen Epstein such hospitality, whether Epstein woke in the morning, like the hero of a mid-century movie, to the aroma of frying bacon and percolating coffee, whether he returned home in the evening to find the proverbial hot meal waiting, the hot wife wearing nothing under her housecoat.

On this morning, however, Melissa was not in the kitchen, not in the living room. The ground floor of the house did not smell of coffee, and the silver laptop lay closed like a clamshell on the sofa. He went into the library, took off his coat, and booted up the computer. Normally, thoughts about work drifted through his mind during non-work hours, but he hadn't thought of Stephen Epstein's library once since Clara's call two days before. Now his mind felt sluggish, distracted. This was always the hardest part of any job—wrapping everything up, correcting the typos from the data that had been processed in Dhaka, tweaking little inconsistencies in the taxonomy, asking for a few more grace notes from the Web programmers. Thomas hated these niggling touches; he much preferred the deep, focused work that preceded it. He hated it even more in this case because, when it was done, a void loomed.

On his computer, he brought up the staged version of the interface between the catalog and the game journals. Entries could be sorted alphabetically by author, subject, or title and also chronologically by date of conflict or year of publication. The site had features that the club members would probably never use—all of them were detailed in a finding aid/user's guide Thomas had written. He was toggling the alphabetical list of authors, A-Z, Z-A, A-Z, Z-A, trying to think of what he should be doing, when Melissa came into the room.

“Everything OK?” she asked. She was wearing a brown corduroy skirt with wooly gray tights, equestrian-style boots, and a puffy down vest over a form-fitting crew-neck shirt.

“Yes,” said Thomas. A-Z, Z-A.

“Your wife's all right?” said Melissa with apparent concern.

“She'll be all right,” said Thomas.

“We both will.” A-Z, Z-A, A-Z.

“What are you doing there?”

“Oh, nothing.” He took his hand off the mouse

“I was worried about you,” she said. And then: “I've got a surprise.”

“Yes?”

“I'm giving you the day off.”

“That's not necessary. I missed yesterday.”

“I called your supervisor, Anderson, after you left. I told him you'd had a family emergency and that I'd pay BiblioFile for the extra day.”

“What did he say?”

“He said it was fine.”

“Anderson said it was fine?”

“Yes. I talked him into it.”

“You didn't have to do that.”

“He also told me that you will be leaving BiblioFile when you're done with this job. Is that true?”

“Yes,” said Thomas.

“Where are you going? You have another job lined up?”

“No,” he said. “I'm being laid off.”

“Oh,” said Melissa, looking startled by the news. “Well, then you're definitely not working today. Maybe not tomorrow, either. Come on, bring your coat. We're going out.”

He logged off from the computer and followed her through the kitchen to the back door, which led to the driveway. It was cold and gusty, a few small flakes of snow whirling in the air around them. Spring still seemed a long way off. They got into her white and gray Lexus, with its heated seats and dual climate controls, and backed down the driveway.

She drove to 280, taking a route through East Orange that people
had told him about but that he'd always had a hard time navigating. He tried to remember the street names but soon was lost. They got on the turnpike going north, as if to the city.

“Where are you taking me?”

“It's a surprise,” she said, and again smiled at him. The car had a cream-colored leather interior. Melissa wore driving gloves, her knuckles showing through holes in the perforated brown leather. Classical music played, though turned low, something from the romantic period. Brahms, he thought. All things considered, this wasn't so bad.

They crossed the George Washington Bridge and got on the Hudson Parkway going north across Spuyten Duyvil into the Bronx. Through the lattice of the bridge's railings, he saw Inwood Hill Park. Thomas almost mentioned that his wife had grown up in that neighborhood but thought better of it. They exited to the Mosholu Parkway and he remembered that Melissa was from Connecticut and wondered if she was taking him there. But what for?

In the end it was perfectly clear where they were going. She drove them around a corner through the entry gates of the New York Botanical Garden.

“Ever been here before?” she asked him.

“No,” he said. He'd only ever ventured into the Bronx with one destination in mind: Yankee Stadium.

“Good,” she said, parking the car.

The wind was stronger here, and the snowflakes, which were small and dry, whipped by in clusters, like insects. At the ticket office, Melissa showed a membership card and they were admitted. There was an open expanse of brown winter grass with a path through it, leading to some greenhouses in the distance. “Quick,” she said. “Let's get inside.” They walked briskly to the nearest structure, which looked like a bleached whale rib cage. Inside, it was warm and humid, like being inside a whale, Thomas thought. They walked along a path that wove through lush green plants, all of
them identified with small gray signs. Melissa took off her down vest and draped it over her forearm as she walked. “Whenever I can't take the winter anymore, I come here,” she said.

They moved into the next greenhouse, which offered a desert climate. Outside, sleet was falling. Thomas could hear its insistent rattle on the glass above them.

“Isn't it nice?” she asked. “All that going on outside and us safe in here.” She took his hand, in a quick, confident gesture, and led him around a large rock formation. Thomas still had not removed his coat, but he felt himself warming up—felt it in tingles at the end of his nose, the tips of his fingers. Melissa led him to a secluded area between the rock and the wall of the greenhouse. There was a brown stone bench there and a thin stream of water falling off the rock into a pool. They sat down. Behind them, beyond the glass, was a gray metal utility shed with scraps of ice clinging to its side. In front of them was a vista that, with some squinting and imagination, could pass for something you might see outside a hotel room in Santa Fe.

“This is one of my favorite places in the city. I used to come here all the time. I'd bring a book or the paper. It always made me feel better, like it reminded my body that things wouldn't always be cold and miserable. I thought maybe it would help you feel better.”

He recognized it as a romantic, flirtatious gesture, but he was grateful nonetheless to be the cause of so much concern from her. “Thank you,” he said. “It's really nice in here.”

“I don't think you can appreciate how much it has meant for me to have you in the house these past few months, Tom.” He'd never corrected her initial use of the abbreviated form of his name. Now it was too late. He was Tom to her, Thomas to everyone else. “Before you came, I thought I was going to lose my mind in that place. I did not realize how much I depended on the routine I had with my husband. But just knowing that you were coming every day got me up, got me moving, made me give a damn. It helped me remember that my life is far from over.”

“Did you really think that? That your life was over?” he asked.

“It seemed that way at the time. At least, that
a
life was over, the life I'd had for the last nine years with Stephen. I didn't see an end coming so soon and I didn't see where I could go next. Like I said, since graduating from college, I've kind of existed without a plan. There were times I felt like such a parasite, just living off his money, doing my thing—spending my days playing tennis or visiting the Botanical Garden. You'd think I could do all that just as well without him, right? I mean, I still have the money. I can do whatever I want. I can even do this,” she said, and kissed him.

Despite the boldness of her words, it was a tentative, closed-mouth kiss that she planted on him, her lips puckered into a small ring of flesh. He felt his body responding reflexively, his hand going to her hip, and then he stopped himself and pulled back.

“No.”

“It's OK,” she said.

“No. My wife.”

“I won't tell her. I promise.”

He smiled.

“I'm serious,” she said. “No complications. Not from me. Now come on. Take off your coat. Look, it's really snowing out there.”

Beyond the glass walls of the conservatory, everything was a swirl of white and gray. “This is what we can be for each other,” she said. “A place of warmth and comfort where we can escape from the world.”

She put her hand on his cheek and pulled his head toward hers. He thought, briefly, of Clara and Guillermo, but they seemed very far away, as if they belonged to another lifetime, a lifetime in which he still had a job and in which Clara was still pregnant with their second child. That life felt less and less real to him now, his time with Melissa more and more real.

She kissed him again and he did not resist.

Clara took Deysei to her obstetrician at the end of August, hoping that it might prompt her niece to open up a little about what had happened with Raúl. She and Thomas had left her niece mostly alone during her first week in the house. Deysei had been spending her time either online or out in the backyard sunning herself and listening to her iPod while she read magazines. Clara suggested that she could invite one of her friends from Inwood to come stay overnight, but Deysei refused, saying that her friends would never come out to Millwood. “I got friends who never even been to Brooklyn,” she said. “Jersey's like going to Africa for them.”

Clara counted on the power of the ultrasound to provoke a reaction, but when the doctor inserted the white wand, the embryo revealed was still so early in its development that it showed up on the screen as no more than a sac filled with grayish matter. There was no heartbeat to hear, no recognizably human shape to see. They might as well have been looking at sonar from a naval vessel. The doctor performed a full exam. Her due date was calibrated as April 2. At the end of the visit, the doctor prescribed prenatal vitamins and asked to see Deysei again in a month, indicating, without actually saying it, that she should get in touch sooner if she decided that she did not want to go through with the pregnancy.

Clara got the prescription filled and gave the vitamins to her niece, but she did not monitor whether Deysei took them. She got
the feeling that Deysei was leaning toward keeping the baby but also that she was in no hurry to make that decision final. It was quite possible, Clara thought, that her niece intended to avoid making a decision until things had gotten far enough along that the decision would be made for her.

Deysei spent much of the remaining days of August either on the cell phone or logged into a social-networking site. It amazed Clara how much of the girl's life was mediated through electronic devices. She desperately wanted to see Deysei's MySpace page, but resisted, thinking that it would be an invasion of her niece's privacy. She was also amazed by the extent to which Yunis had disappeared from her daughter's life, completely abdicating to Clara the role of shepherding Deysei through the early stages of her pregnancy and the difficult decision ahead. Every time Clara called D.R., Yunis was either out, or sleeping—a pattern their mother had been less than thrilled to report to Clara.

Clara accepted the role. During the interlude between the visit to the OB and the start of school, Clara gently prodded and interrogated her. She wanted to be precisely the sort of older-and-wiser adviser that she herself had never had as a teenager—not accusing, not criticizing, just trying to get her to disclose what had happened, trying to move her toward a decision. Early on, these attempts to get Deysei to tell her more had been unsuccessful. “That's all I'm going to say for now, Tía. I got to think about what I want to do.”

“Deysei,” said Clara. “You have to tell me one thing, at least.”

“What?”

“Did Raúl rape you?”

“No, Tía,” said her niece, looking her in the eye, and Clara believed her.

On the final day of the summer vacation, Deysei finally opened up. They were in the Roy Rogers in the Livingston Mall (there was no McDonald's to satisfy what her niece still refused to admit was
a craving). Clara had taken her out for some last-minute back-to-school shopping. The place was full of mothers doing the same for their children. It was far from the first time Clara had vicariously treated Deysei as her daughter. Before she'd met Thomas, and before her sister had shacked up with Raúl, Clara had been almost as much a parent to Deysei as Yunis had, spending most weekends with them, taking her to the movies, helping her with schoolwork, and footing the bill for birthday parties and wardrobe upgrades. Thomas often said that his courtship with Clara was in part a process of wooing her away from her niece. Since then, as Deysei had entered her teenage years, Clara had seen less of her and felt that she did not know her nearly as well as she once had. You could not be a parent from a distance and, besides, she had her hands full with Guillermo.

Livingston was a prosperous suburb, but the Roy Rogers seemed to have been lifted, customers and all, out of the Port Authority bus station. In the midst of artisanal olive oil retailers and Abercrombie & Fitch, the restaurant offered a haven for the unkempt, the uncouth, and the homeless. Across from them sat three generations of women from the same family separated in age, Clara guessed, by no more than thirty-five years. Deysei registered it, too, watching the grandmother scold her teenage daughter about letting the infant put the paper straw cover in her mouth.