I’m sorry we got cut off the first time in years I got to hear your voice. The card ran out of money.
I was floating on happy clouds for three weeks. Nothing troubled me. Nothing could.
Lorenzo became the most protective of boyfriends.
He didn’t want me to work with him anymore. He said it was too dangerous. So I asked Father Emilio if I could help him out at the orphanage for a few pesos, and he let me, but the kids were always getting sick with stuff, and soon I got sick. I caught some awful fever swamp thing and started to bleed, and couldn’t work at all. I couldn’t do anything but lie in bed, and Lorenzo said he would work for both of us, and did. He was gone from the house morning till night. He never slept anymore, and you remember how much my Lorenzo loves his beauty rest. He distributed pamphlets, sold trinkets, was a cycle messenger and then a rickshaw driver. Lorenzo made us money, and Father Emilio came every day on his walkabouts and brought me fruit.
I was feeling better. And then the most awful thing happened.
Lorenzo was hired to protest against the Manila/MILF agreement. MILF is a faction group, a breakaway paramilitary organization, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. For years they’ve been raising Cain in Mindanao, where Lorenzo is from, claiming the island is theirs, wanting independence from the Philippines, but, Lorenzo’s parents live there, and millions of other native Filipinos. After years of arson and assault and street attacks, the Philippine government finally agreed to give part of Mindanao to the Muslims. You’d think that would be the end, but no. MILF kept asking for more. To get peace, the government has been giving them more. And more. More land, more resources, more autonomy—and still no peace. Over two hundred thousand lives have been lost in the fighting. So Lorenzo goes to protest handing over 712 more villages in Mindanao to the Muslims, and not two days later, his mother’s uncle comes down to Las Pinas, finds San Agustin, finds us, and tells Lorenzo that both his parents, both his parents!, died a month ago when their village was torched during an occupation by the MILF rebels. They were killed at Sulu Sea on their boat in the early morning, while rowing to shore.
The rebels surrendered to the Filipino commander, and there were many other civilians killed but what good is that to Lorenzo? He has lost his mind. He is completely inconsolable. And raging at his poor Papi and Mama too, because he’s been begging them to leave Zamboanga for years, ever since the worst of the troubles started, but they kept saying it was their home and they wouldn’t go.
I don’t know what to do. My poor Lorenzo. Just at the time when we should be so happy. Instead, he is sick with grief. I draw a little sad face on my letter. Hope you’re doing better. Can’t imagine you could be doing much worse.
I keep praying there won’t be any more trouble, but when I look at Lorenzo’s stricken face, I get so afraid, like all the trouble is still to come.
Thank you for your package, the clothes, the money. Money was most appreciated. The clothes, don’t be mad, but I think you forgot how tiny I am, they were all too big for me. Plus, they were winter maternity. And it doesn’t get cold here. I sold them, and made some money from your top-of-the-line American merchandise. I paid my rent for two months with those clothes. I love you.
5
Doug’s Jaguar
“I want to show you something, man! Come look.”
Jared was sitting at his desk at work, sorting through his bank and credit card statements. Something in them vaguely bothered him.
“Come downstairs for a sec.”
“Doug, downstairs where? Like outside? We’ve got a board meeting in fifteen, and we still have to go over—”
“It’ll just take a sec. Come on.” Doug was like a kid.
Out in the parking lot covered with mounds of snow, Jared saw what Doug was so excited about. It was a gray Jaguar sedan.
“Oh, man, I can’t believe you did it!” Jared walked around the car. “You took the plunge!”
“Yeah, baby! Will you just look at it! XJ8. Vapor Gray metallic. Are you seeing it with your eyes?”
“I’m seeing it. It’s amazing.”
“No fucking kidding. I got tired of you going on about Larissa’s Jag, so over the weekend the wife and I went to check it out, see what all the fuss is about. Well, one minute, we’re windowshopping, and the next I’m forking over the whole Christmas bonus for the down payment and signing on the dotted line. I don’t even know how it happened!” He opened the doors, had Jared touch the soft black leather. “You wanna go for a ride?”
“Doug, what about the board meeting in ten minutes? How about we go at lunch? I’ll let you take me out.”
“Done. I can’t believe you bought your wife a convertible Jag,” Doug said, his hands on the hood. “I didn’t know what that meant until we drove this one, which is already like a space ship and the salesman said, yeah, but the sports model has 420 horsepower. Did you buy Larissa the regular or the supercharged?”
“What do you think?”
“Oh, man, you’re nucking futs!”
Jared shrugged. “It’s what she wanted. Might as well have the best, if you’re going to go all out. Otherwise what’s the point?”
“Yeah, well,” said Doug, “we didn’t want to spend that kind of money and not let the kids inside it. I bet Larissa never lets hers in.”
“You bet correctly.”
Doug shook his head. “See, we didn’t want that, Kate and I. Sedan seemed so much more practical.”
Jared studied Doug. “Douglas, you’re my friend, and we go back a long way, but what the hell are you talking about? It’s a fucking Jaguar. Who wants to be practical? This is supposed to be a mad car.”
“Not when you have kids. You have to be a little bit sensible. We’re not teenagers anymore.”
Jared just shook his head. “I guess. And like you could afford this when you were a teenager.”
“Too true. But isn’t it incredible?”
“Beyond belief. Congratulations.”
“I know. I’m excited like I had another baby or something! Should I pass out some cigars?”
Jared laughed. “Absolutely. But what I don’t understand is, did you buy the car for yourself or for Kate?”
“For Kate; why do you ask?”
“So then…what are you doing driving it?”
“Well, just look at it. Do you even need to ask?”
“So you bought her a car, and then took it for yourself?”
Doug demurred. “I just drove it today, to show you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And besides, Kate works in the city and takes the train in. Be a shame for a beauty like this to sit in our garage all day, lonely, undriven, in that cold mean dark space. I can’t believe you’d even suggest it.”
“You’re right, what was I thinking?”
“Do you know it’s got an Adaptive Restraint Technology System?” Doug chuckled. “I don’t even know what the hell that is. Plus, look, a DVD-based navigation system. That cost another three grand. You guys have one?”
Something about that itched Jared in the chest like a sudden irritant. It was those words. Navigation system. Not just by itself, but somehow related to the statements lying on his desk upstairs. What did the navigation system that Larissa bought nearly a year ago and the credit card statements from last month have to do with one another? Both gave him the same bad feeling. “Come on, Douglas. We gotta jet.”
Doug locked up and they started walking back.
“Did you go to the Madison Jag?” Jared asked.
“Yeah, of course. That’s the one you recommended.”
“Did I? I don’t think I did. Maybe Larissa did. Who helped you?”
“Um, I can’t remember his name. Weird name. He was a good kid, though.”
“Kai?”
“Yeah! Your salesman, too?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t impressed.”
“Oh, no, the wife and I loved him. He knew everything about the car, was patient, let my wife drive for an hour, gave us
the history of the vehicle. And he gave us a fantastic deal. I sent him a bottle of Cristal to thank him. And he must be doing something right, because he was wearing an Armani jacket cut like you wouldn’t believe. The commissions must be rolling in.”
“He talked to you?”
“What do you mean, did he talk to me? He’s a salesman!”
Jared shook his head. “Odd. Because I just hated him. He didn’t say a word to me. If it weren’t for Larissa, I never would’ve bought it from him. He was like a deaf mute.”
Doug laughed. “You must have made him mad. He was nice as apple pie to me and Kate. What did you do to make your salesman all pissed off at you?” He pressed the button for the fourteenth floor in the elevator.
“Nothing,” said Jared, already mentally at the board meeting, where he had to present a new proposal for the Financial Services Division to outsource the work because the investment managers could not handle the case load, and to listen to an introduction of innovative methodology for the life assurance funds, and in the recesses of his mind, right before the summary of the new reporting requirements to benefit consumers, Jared realized what it was that was bothering him about the bank statements.
Larissa wasn’t shopping.
“Larissa, you haven’t been buying anything,” Jared said to her that Saturday night after tenderloin and before ice cream.
“We haven’t been to the mall in ages,” Maggie said. “Since before Christmas.”
“Before Christmas? That can’t be.” Larissa shook her head.
“Mags is right, Lar,” said Jared. “You know how I know? I see the bills. And there aren’t any. You’re not buying anything except food at Stop&Shop and shampoo at the drugstore.”
Larissa shrugged, a study in casual indifference. “I’m not buying anything because I have everything.”
“Since when has that stopped you in the past?” said Ezra. “Maggie over here has more hair products than can fit in one medium-sized house. Does that stop her?”
Larissa smiled. “I don’t have curly hair like Maggie. I don’t need quite so much.”
“But what about shoes, Lar? You don’t need new suede boots?”
“Nope. Have a pair from last year. And the year before.”
“A new sweater?”
“Have dozens I never wear.”
“Makeup?”
“Too much of everything, Jared,” said Larissa, smiling benevolently at him from across the table. “What’s this? The husband is complaining that the wife doesn’t shop enough?”
“Well, your not shopping is new. I’m bound to notice,” he said. “And you go to the mall. You’re always telling me you’re at the mall.”
“I like to window shop.”
“There’s a red Escada jacket in the windows of the Macy’s in Newark,” said Jared. “It would look smashing on you.”
Larissa turned her elongated neck to Jared. “Hon, you want me to go all the way to Newark to buy a jacket?”
“I’m just saying.”
She lives in secret, hides between words and minutes, while her soul remains in a 20 by 20 room between the hours of twelve and two.
While waiting at the red light, she thinks, I can’t take much more of this.
That lasts eleven minutes, on the way to Lincoln from Albright. Then she picks up her boy and gets home, and then the school bus delivers more (of her) kids. There is subtraction, a Social Studies project on the Badlands, and a twenty-line free-verse poem on a bar of chocolate. There is a phone call from Jared asking what’s for dinner, and Larissa saying, “What, if it’s something you don’t like, you won’t be coming home?” and him laughing. “Just tell me what’s for dinner and then I’ll decide.”
There is a basketball game on Friday, a dinner, a movie, a birthday party, and two more, lunch in Connecticut with friends, and then on Monday another week begins, and Larissa is grateful that things remain as they are, just a hazy Summit week, where the mother of three gets up on a Monday, kisses and dresses her children, packs them off to school, kisses her husband, tidies up the kitchen, showers, barely dresses, and then zooms down Main Street in her supercharged Winter Gold rocket with a navigation system, nine minutes if she hurries and makes all the lights, turns into Albright, parks the Jag, sprints up the stairs. He is waiting, open arms, smile on his face, ardent lips, ardent everything. And she thinks: I will take as much of this as I need to.
They showered together, makeup running down her cheeks, they made love in the shower, bubbling up the lava place inside from where she craved him, with which she craved him. And then—having to go.
“I don’t want to go,” she said when two o’clock came, 2:15 came.
It was 2:20 and she was still there.
“I don’t want you to go,” Kai said. They had bagels by the bed, coffee. The music had stopped. No sounds at all, except them, in bed, pressed together, laughing when they weren’t coming.
At 2:25 she threw her clothes on, anointed with sex, sweat, moisture, anointed with Kai on her bones, in her pores, like sacramental sacrilegious perfume.
She gazed at him, longingly, regretfully, lying naked on top of the bed, stretched out, absent-mindedly caressing himself, looking at her. Her whole body ached as she put her shoes on. Nothing was right on Monday afternoons. It was like cramps, like labor. I must go. I haven’t worked it out any other way. There is no other way. I must go.
“Larissa,” he said, “imagine a world in which you wouldn’t have to leave me. Can you imagine such a world?”
Too well, she wanted to say.
Not at all, she wanted to say.
She was late: 2:35 and she was twelve minutes away from the school. When she got there, with Michelangelo waiting with Mrs. Brown inside the doors because it was so cold, she smiled apologetically.
“It’s fine, Mrs. Stark,” Mrs. Brown said, “but I have been noticing that every Monday for the last several months now you’ve been coming late to pick him up. Could you leave ten minutes earlier? Because I’ve got teacher assessments to do on Mondays and I’m always here waiting with your son.”
That evening Michelangelo said over baked ziti, “Mommy was late picking me up again.”
Jared looked up from his garlic bread. “Again?”
“She’s late all the time, Dad.”
“Michelangelo! I pick you up five days a week. I am not late all the time.”
“The teacher yelled at her today.”
“Really, yelled?” Jared glanced at her with amusement. “What was Mommy doing that she was late?”
“Getting stuck in traffic in Chatham, that’s what,” said Mommy. “There was an accident.”
“Yes, but what about all the other times, oh late Mother?” said Michelangelo.
Larissa rolled her eyes. But after that, she tried very hard not to be late. The following Monday she was only five minutes late. Mrs. Brown raised her eyebrows.
In the evening Michelangelo said, “Mommy was late again.”
Jared raised his eyebrows. “Accident in Chatham?”
“No, a horrible woman at Neiman’s was paying in cash and they didn’t have any change. Can you imagine, a cash register not having any change! The salesgirl had to go across the entire floor to get change.”
“Ah. Nice to see you finally shopping,” said Jared. “I hope whatever you got was worth it.”
“Well, I didn’t get it, did I? I couldn’t wait anymore. I dropped everything and ran.”
“What was it?”
“A trench coat.”
Two days later Larissa came back with a Gucci trench coat to show Jared. And the following Monday she tried very hard not to be late.
Kai, lying on top of his sheets naked, perspired, icy wind through the curtains, frosty daylight outside, the wood floor shiny, the sheets white, the male bed full of Kai, his twinkling eyes, his bare chest, his long legs splayed out, his lovely wet mouth whispering, “Don’t go, Larissa.” Singing in a whisper, “Beautiful girl, stay with me…” br />
She couldn’t imagine where this was headed, and she couldn’t imagine where she was headed, except down Main Street to Albright Circle.
Chapter Two
1
Paolo and Francesca
Larissa and Maggie met at last at Summit station to take the train to New York to have lunch with Bo. Maggie wore loose, dark, non-descript clothes, while Larissa was decked out in a fitted short blood-red Escada jacket and boot-cut white jeans.
“It’s winter white,” she said to Maggie, who stared inquisitively.
“Ah.” Her curls stifled in a severe bun, Maggie turned her head to the window. The train passed the monastery of the Dominican Nuns of Summit in the distance. “Do you know,” Maggie said, “that I’ve taken to going there and sitting in the chapel? They make the most beautiful music during lauds.”
“Lauds?” Larissa repeated as if she’d never heard the word before. “What time is that?”
“At 5:55,” Maggie replied in a voice that sounded like it was still at the chapel. “On Sundays it starts ten minutes later, at 6:05.”
“Ten whole minutes later? And how would you know?”
“Because,” said Maggie, “I go there on Sundays, too.”
Larissa studied her friend’s hair, half turned gray. Maggie stopped coloring it long ago, and her pale face was devoid of makeup. Something stirred inside Larissa, like something she was supposed to do, or talk to Maggie about, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember what it was.
Larissa wanted to ask why Maggie started going to lauds at the monastery, but what she asked instead was, “I didn’t know their chapel was open to the public.”
“Of course,” Maggie said, turning her face away from Larissa. “It’s a church.”
“No, I know, but isn’t a monastery supposed to be a cloistered affair? Like aren’t the nuns supposed to be hidden or something? Because they’re Dominican, right? I read something about that. They, like, mainly pray for the salvation of souls but lead a hidden life.”
“It’s a church,” Maggie repeated. “Their mission is one of intercession. How hidden could they be if their mission is intercession?”