About My Life and the Kept Woman

  I rang. Mr. Taub appeared. He was in a robe that swished audibly.

  I hesitated. I had not expected an apartment.

  “Oh, your manuscript.” He held out his hand when he saw that I was carrying it; he eased it out of my hands. He glanced at the title. “Pablo!—yes, with an exclamation mark. Excuse”—he brushed his hand over his informal attire—“I like to relax when I come home from the office.”

  The apartment was large, luxurious, two stories.

  I followed him into the living room—all soft, plushy furniture. I followed him upstairs. Rather, I followed my manuscript into his vast bedroom. He placed my manuscript in a drawer next to his bed, which looked like a tasteless king’s—gathered drapery in back, held together by a large gold ring at the top.

  “Sit down; let’s be comfortable.” He sat on the huge ornate bed and patted the mattress beside him.

  I did not move from the door. “You said we were going to talk about the job. What is the job and what is the salary?” I could excuse myself for having withheld those questions earlier because of his eagerness to see my novel, and because of my anticipation.

  “The job? Easy—for you. The salary? That will be up to you, how well you perform.” The smile on his face was authoritative, knowing, a sneer.

  “Let me have my manuscript back,” I said.

  “Oh, why? I want to read it. Now sit down.”

  He had adopted a commanding tone.

  “Give me back my manuscript.”

  “I told you I’d read it, and I will. I’m sure you realize I have contacts with many agents, editors.” That smile. He looked even more like a frog now.

  “I want it back,” I said firmly.

  “Go ahead and leave if you want to,” he yawned.

  “Not without my manuscript.”

  “I’ll read it—and then you can come back. I’ll give Pablo! … with an exclamation mark,” he smirked; “I’ll give it back to you then. Now why don’t you sit down with me?” He reached over and pressed his hand against the drawer where he had placed my manuscript.

  Crazily, I thought how disappointed Wilford would be with me, that I had given the book he had praised to this man. I moved swiftly into the room, to stand close to him, assuming a tough posture learned on the street; it came easily. “Give my manuscript back to me, fucker.”

  He didn’t budge, didn’t wince. “Oh, come on, young man, don’t make such drama out of it. You’re here willingly, aren’t you? And you did put that ad in the paper, didn’t you?”

  “For a job, yes!” I said wondering if I had lost the tone of menace, if I was pleading. “Motherfucker—” It was the first time I had used that word that had shocked me in the army, a word other hustlers along Times Square used randomly. “You never asked my age, did you, Taub?” On the streets, I passed for someone younger.

  The smile froze. “What does that mean?”

  “That I’m underage,” I lied. “The doorman asked me how old I was when I said I was coming up here, and I told him.”

  He opened the drawer and handed me the manuscript.

  Outside, as I passed the doorman, he looked at me with clear contempt. I didn’t care. New street cunning had come easily.

  I did get a job, in a public relations office across from the United Nations building, with a political organization I knew nothing about, with the fancy name of American Heritage Foundation. I worked for a kind old-time journalist, drunk by midday, who wrote news releases about the foundation that was, now, sponsoring something called “Crusade for Freedom.” That meant little to me. I sat at my own desk, typing form letters individually to various people across the country, explaining that their donation would allow a “freedom balloon” to be launched over the Berlin Wall by a group of patriotic citizens. I was then unaware of the political implications of what I was typing out by rote.

  I sent my mother money regularly.

  Every day I rushed to receive my mail from the Jamaican doorman at the Casbah—my mother’s long-distance unpunctuated blessings, and notes from my brother Robert (“Need anything, brother?”) appended to her letters.

  There was a long letter from my sister Olga. In anticipation of all her news, I didn’t read it until I was lying down in the small bed in my room in the Casbah. Their move to Los Angeles had been delayed by expenses. Robert was going out with “a real horror, a weird woman” who powdered her face heavily in order to look white, not dark.

  Then this:

  “Marisa Guzman was in El Paso. She came to visit her mother, who’s been sick. Marisa brought her lots of presents. Tina was there, too, to visit her sister. Señor’s wife asked Marisa if she was still de Leon’s kept woman. Marisa said yes and that she was happy. Señor’s wife rejected the presents. “‘They’re bought with tainted money,’” my sister quoted her angrily. “She even blamed Marisa for Señor’s death by returning for my wedding. She told her the least she could have done was to disguise herself so no one would have recognized her.”

  I remembered the spry old woman who had appeared to be free of Señor. His curses on his daughter must have festered within her during all those years.

  At the bottom of her letter, my sister had written, obviously hurriedly, probably having heard the news just as she was about to seal the letter:

  “I’m sure now that the columnist Alicia married doesn’t know who she really is! How is that possible? More later.”

  I put the letter aside and closed my eyes, remembering Isabel—no, it was Marisa as I had first seen her, the elegant, poised outcast, smoking, alone.

  23

  I left my job at the American Heritage Foundation, finally aware that it was a right-wing group which stood for everything I was growing to detest. I gave notice, saying good-bye to the kind alcoholic man who had hired me. I took the elevator down. On another floor, the door slid open, and there stood—

  I gasped. Was it possible? Yes, but if so, why wasn’t everybody else gasping? There stood—

  Eleanor Roosevelt!

  Noting my reaction, she smiled down at me—I had never seen anyone so tall and imposing—and said, “Good morning, young man.”

  I was so overcome with awe that I wasn’t able to answer.

  She had been a hero of my father’s. Another revelation: the man committed to liberal, even radical, causes was the man who had turned into my enemy, a wounded enemy.

  When the elevator landed on the floor of her office and the grand lady exited, I shouted after her, “Good morning, Mrs. Roosevelt!”

  The interlude on the elevator was an appropriate ending to my stint at the right-wing foundation.

  * * *

  I moved out of the shadows of the Casbah. I rented a room in an old, elegant building on upper Riverside Drive. Outside my window was a strip of park that ran along the river. In the late afternoon, a splash of sun on the water reflected into my room. I chose the room because of that.

  I began a pattern. Because of my experience with courts-martial in the army, I could easily get a temporary job with lawyers, through a specialized agency that had responded to my earlier ad. I would work a few days, then stop. I returned to the hustling turfs. Progressively, even while I was working, I would hustle. I did not need the money. I needed only sex money, the uncommitting admiration that it affirmed.

  I called Wilford. He was delighted to know I was in New York. Yes, yes, we would get together.

  I wanted to do something special for him, to establish our friendship, to establish it firmly, on what I wanted to be a new level. There was a communal kitchen in the wing I lived in. I did not know how to cook—my mother would have shooed us out of the kitchen if we had attempted to cook. I had seen in a grocery store nearby cans of “chicken à la king.” There was a recipe on each can; all it required was buttered toast points. I bought three cans and a loaf of wheat bread. I bought three avocados. I bought a bottle of white wine I chose because it seemed expensive. I bought a salad dressing that looked pretty. I invited Wilford to d
inner.

  Before he arrived, I hastily heated the cans of chicken à la king in pots, scrubbed thoroughly, provided in the community kitchen. I toasted the bread and cut it into triangles. I cut the avocados into wedges. I borrowed some dishes and a corkscrew from a man who lived across from me and would always open the door when he heard me. “Who’s the lucky party?” he asked me.

  I showered and dressed, making sure I looked terrific.

  “Wilford!”

  “Johnny!”

  We hugged. There was catching-up talk, rushed—Was I going to Columbia? Had his play gone well in Urbana? would it come to New York?

  “You look great,” he said. “As vain as ever?”

  “More than ever,” I said. “You look fine, too, Wilford. It’s wonderful to see you.”

  Then it all became strained. It was time for dinner.

  I filled the plates in the kitchen and brought them into my room, pretending—though I didn’t dare claim it—that I had cooked. I arranged everything on a small desk, part of the furnished room.

  “It’s all awfully good,” Wilford said. But he wasn’t eating.

  “I love chicken à la king,” I told him. “And avocados.”

  “Johnny—” Wilford smiled. “You didn’t have to do this, you know.”

  “Do what?”

  “Uh—cook.”

  “I didn’t really cook anything,” I confessed what I suspected he must have known.

  “Oh.” Then he burst into laughter.

  I joined him. He pushed his plate away. “I can’t stand chicken à la king, and I hate avocados. Let’s just have some wine, OK?”

  I was relieved. Even to me, the meal had been awful, parts of the saucy mixture—hardly any chicken—tasting cold, others only warm.

  I sat on the couch, which was the bed when it was opened and pulled out. Wilford stood up from the desolate table and sat next to me. He moved closer. He placed his hand on one of my legs, just inches from my fly. I closed my eyes. I would force myself to cope with whatever happened now. My body refused.

  “Johnny—”

  I stood up quickly. “Wilford, I—it’s just that—”

  Standing, too, he smiled at me. “I understand, I really do,” he said. He looked at his watch. “God, it’s late! I have to go. Dinner was great.”

  We both laughed.

  “We’ll stay in touch?”

  “Oh, yes, of course.”

  I never saw him again; neither of us ever called again; we never wrote again. Eventually, he became one of the most respected directors on Broadway. I delighted in the triumphs of this man who would remain one of the most important, and loved, people in my life.

  I was twenty-three, still able to pass as someone younger; but each day, it seemed, new drifters appeared on the hustling streets, picked up before the rest of us, who had become familiar. We avoided looking at each other when the time without connection stretched out.

  With my duffel bag and my hardly used typewriter, I impulsively left New York in September, before it could turn cold. The day I left, the city I had grown tired of looked uncommonly beautiful, the leaves still green fluttering in a cool breeze but turning yellow.

  “M’ijo!” My mother’s arms engulfed me.

  Mine engulfed her.

  My sister Olga, packing in preparation for their move—finally—to Los Angeles, had gained a few more pounds after giving birth to a girl, but she was as beautiful as ever, and every bit as much the gossip. After “catching up,” she launched easily into how she was sure the columnist didn’t know who his wife really was.

  Tina—who, apparently, still cared about her daughter despite her frequent declarations otherwise and her relegation of Isabel “to the mercy of God”—had been informed by her contact in San Francisco, “a true friend,” that the columnist continued to write about his “Spanish wife from New Orleans.”

  “What I’d like to know is how she’s kept the truth from him,” my sister said, verbalizing the recurring consideration.

  I wondered about that too, though it was possible that the columnist might be withholding his belated discovery for reasons of public embarrassment. I remembered the pretty young woman who had cried that night in my uncle’s Cadillac when I had attempted to light her cigarette and had seen her hands trembling.

  There was something I had to do, here in El Paso.

  I returned to “Alligator Plaza,” San Jacinto Plaza, where the laughter of queens had floated lazily into the summer night when I was still in school. Had I been courting their attention, years earlier, when I had gone out of my way to pass by them? They were gone now, the painted ones, the wonderfully brazen ones. They had been replaced by men sitting alone, walking about idly, talking softly to someone, then moving on.

  I leaned against the stone railing around the fountain; the sleepy alligators that once lingered there were long gone. An older man sidled up to me. “Hello, young man.”

  I turned to face someone whom I thought for a moment I recognized. No, not at all.

  “Hi.”

  “You traveling across the country?” he asked me. His voice quivered.

  “Yes,” I pretended.

  “You must be broke,” he said, trying to sound friendly, his voice forced low, speaking words I knew he had spoken before in this very plaza.

  “Yeah, I am, I—” The role I had adopted on Times Square played itself.

  “I would be happy to help you out if—”

  I recognized him. He was my high school math teacher.

  My pose shattered before this lonely man from my boyhood.

  “It was nice to talk to you,” I said, surrendering the pose, even the tone of my voice—and now grasping for the right words that would hurt him least, disappoint him least. “I lost track of time—I’m leaving on the Greyhound bus in less than an hour. Really good talking to you, I really mean it.”

  He drifted away.

  I had not succeeded in my intent, to test in El Paso the person I had become in Times Square.

  My sister Olga finished the arrangements for moving, and with her family, she left El Paso. “Come to Los Angeles, little brother,” she told me. “You can stay with us as long as you want.”

  Los Angeles, yes.

  Once again I carried my mother’s departing blessing with me—each parting more painful than the last—as I traveled to Los Angeles with my duffel bag and the Royal typewriter after a few more days in El Paso.

  In the Greyhound bus as it traveled across the New Mexico desert, I dozed and woke up startled to look out the window and see giant stone formations like prehistoric beasts advancing along the highway.

  In the morning, and on a yellow-gray plain out of which cactus bloomed, the bus arrived at the border of California. A small square building the color of dirt indicated an immigration checkpoint.

  A hefty immigration officer entered the bus, the whoosh of its doors seeming to suck him in. He walked along the aisle, glancing right and left at everyone.

  In the back row of seats, a Mexican family, a man and a woman with a little girl, sat rigidly. They had been so quiet since we had all boarded that I hadn’t noticed them until now.

  “Get off, amigos.” Without explaining why he was taking them off—because they were clearly migrant Mexicans—he marched them off the bus. I looked back as they all disappeared into the interrogation site. The bus rolled on into the desert. A sign proclaimed:

  CALIFORNIA

  24

  The bus depot was in the center of downtown Los Angeles. It was bustling with people, seething with activity. I left my duffel bag and typewriter in a rented locker and walked out. I wouldn’t call my sister right away. With the instinct I had developed for picking up signposts—the bus station was one—I knew I would find, nearby, an extension of the turf I had left in New York.

  I crossed the street, one block, two. Fifth Street. Main Street. There it was—a row of sleezy bars, all-night movie theaters, fast-food stands.

  Haro
ld’s bar. A long bar with ratty booths, faded drawings of beach scenes on the walls. A bartender swishing and giggling with men at the counter. Two factions I recognized immediately: young men—a few tougher-looking here—and those looking for them, some wearing jackets, loosened ties, as if they had just left office jobs.

  “Oh, my God, look what just walked in! Hold me, girls, I’m going to fai-aiaiaiai-nt!”

  It was the swishy bartender screechingly welcoming me to Los Angeles.

  * * *

  Instead of calling my sister to pick me up, I took a cab to her address, to surprise her. She lived in a pretty bungalow in a court with Wve units. Flowers bloomed in a small courtyard with two grand palm trees.

  “Little brother!”

  “Beautiful sister!”

  Gorgeous as ever, perhaps even more so, my sister had lost her excess weight, a fact she exhibited by whirling around before me. I accepted her invitation to stay with her; her husband had agreed. I would sleep in a small room off the dining room. I got along with her two children, the boy I knew and the new daughter. I sang them the song my sister Blanca had taught me in anticipation of an invitation from Shirley Temple in response to my offer to join her: “Come along and follow me, to the bottom of the sea.”

  To be sure that I would be allowed to pay for groceries during the few days I would stay here, I went with my sister to the nearby Safeway.

  An Anglo woman, leaving the store, glanced at us, detoured, and hurried back breathlessly to approach us.

  “You’re—!” the woman began in awe, addressing my sister.

  My sister waited, courting some marvelous comparison, I knew. It came.

  “—You’re Ava Gardner, aren’t you? But what are you doing in this part of town?”

  My sister laughed her terrific, delighted laughter. I wondered whether she would playfully tell the woman that she was the movie star, and make up a story about why she was shopping here, borrowing from some movie or other for dramatic effect.

  “I love this part of the city,” she told the woman and smiled warmly. “No, ma’am, I’m not the movie star. I’m Olga Guzman.”