Ned sat waiting on the black couch. He wore a gray felt hat with a top crease. As they approached, he removed the hat and bowed his head. Then a foolish smile came across his face. Ned seemed to be mocking the prospect of his own politeness. He was no gentleman and clearly found this hilarious.
Sheila led them to a large room with one mirrored wall and a creaky king bed. The three of them got naked and it all felt very clinical. The room was a bit cold. Ned seemed giddy. It was as if his depression had receded, he glittered temporarily while aroused. He stood alongside the bed and motioned to it until the girls climbed on. “You’re an odd couple,” he said, waving his finger at them. “One big and one skinny. But that must be part of the turn-on.” He grinned. “Calm down. I’m kidding.”
A pained smile transformed Lucy’s face. She was posed like a mermaid on a rock, yellow hair half covering her breasts. Kit made a concerted effort not to stare.
Lucy’s kisses were muscular with no feeling behind them. She broke into breathy counterfeit moans and Kit cringed. Their teeth clicked. Kit felt a bit the way men must feel, she supposed, when they realize that the prostitute they’ve purchased is miserable to be near them. She wasn’t sure why she had expected it to be any other way. I’m just another creep who wants to touch her, she thought. A little creep hiding behind a bigger one.
Afterward the sky outside was a gray peach. They rode the train to Lucy’s apartment with amazed expressions. Once home, Lucy lit the candles by her bed. It was as if someone had died. Kit searched her face for disgust, but there was only hurt. Lucy sat on the floor beside Curtis, mechanically stroking his muscles.
They ordered Chinese food and stood in the kitchen, eating lo mein from takeout containers. Lucy’s glazed look of pain dissipated. She hummed and Kit hated her a little bit. For pretending to be unmarked by the last few hours. And by every other terrible hour of her life. Curtis hopped madly at their ankles. His cries were comically bad, as if a blade were being driven into his body.
“Is he okay?” Kit asked.
“He’s fine,” Lucy said. “Those are the screams of a manipulator.” She scraped brown slop from a can into a little blue bowl and set it down on the floor. Curtis trotted over with a look of slack-jaw joy. He bent down to eat.
“He appears well behaved when he’s eating,” Kit said.
“Everyone does,” Lucy said.
Kit set her lo mein by the sink. “Am I your only friend?” she asked. “I don’t mean that in a bitchy way. I don’t have any others.”
Lucy stared at her. “In a way you are. I used to have a lot of friends.”
Kit had never had a lot of friends. But she’d had a few that she didn’t have now. Becoming a whore is like getting very sick, she thought. You don’t want people and they don’t want you. Only she did want people. A little.
“Ned’s daughter is dying of cancer,” Kit blurted.
“He told you that today?”
“No. Before. I should have told you. I just didn’t want you to feel sorry for him.”
“I wouldn’t have.”
“Really?”
“I don’t feel anything for these people,” Lucy said dryly.
Kit reached into her bag and felt around. She wondered what Lucy did feel. Outside an ambulance wailed by, its twirling red lights passing over the ceiling. She lit a joint and stood with it burning between her fingers. “I don’t know why I get high,” she said. “My mind is so inherently trippy.”
“Maybe you should quit.”
“Maybe.” Kit let herself stare at Lucy. It was a quiet, burning stare. Her eyes blazed, pouring with feeling. Lucy continued to eat, as if she did not notice. But she did.
PATRICIA ENGEL
Campoamor
FROM Chicago Quarterly Review
Natasha is my girlfriend. Sometimes I love her. Sometimes I don’t think of her at all. When I met her she had a broken leg. I was visiting my friend Abel, who sells mobile phone minutes and lives down the hall from her in a building behind the Capitolio. I heard her crying, calling for anyone. I thought it was an old woman who’d fallen but when I pushed the door open I saw a girl, maybe twenty-five, standing like an ibis on one leg, leaning on a metal crutch, her other leg bent and floating in a plaster cast. The stray crutch lay meters from her reach across the broken tile floor.
She looked angry even though I was there to help her. I stepped into her apartment, saw she was alone, picked up the crutch, and handed it to her. She slipped it under her arm and thanked me. I asked her how she got around. Her place was on the fifth floor and there was no elevator.
“I’ve been up here for two months.”
“Alone?”
“My mother lives here but she works during the day.”
I asked her name and she told me Natasha, embarrassed the way we of our generation are to have Russian names.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “My name is Vladimir.”
When I returned a week later to buy more minutes for my phone from Abel, I knocked on Natasha’s door and it cracked open. Later she admitted there was no lock and no money to buy one so at night she and her mother pushed a dresser in front of it. She was sitting on a sofa with ebony legs, upholstered in a ripping flesh-colored silk, bulges of cushion tissue and bone frame exposed. Her casted calf was propped on a pillow mound atop the glass coffee table. She sat surrounded by books and said she only ever got up to go use the bathroom and to make herself something to eat.
“Don’t you get lonely up here, Natasha?”
She shrugged.
“How did you break your leg?”
“It was stupid. Un mal paso. I was dancing with a bad dancer. He made me slip.”
I was standing so she had to look up at me, trying to decide if she should let herself smile.
“I’ll come and see you again,” I told her. She said nothing but I could see in her eyes she liked the idea. And so I kept coming, every time I needed a new phone card, and sometimes in between, and Natasha would invite me to sit on the sofa beside her and would offer only a few sentences. I could see she was depressed in that dark apartment, subject to the shadows of the Capitolio and the noise of its endless restoration, drills and hammers on stone, with not even a television to keep her company because theirs had burnt out years ago and there was no money and no man to take it to be fixed.
I asked Abel what he knew about her. He’s a writer like me. We met at the university where we both studied journalism. Abel writes small pieces for Granma and for an anonymous underground newspaper that gets published on USB sticks and passed around Havana once a month. He also sells black market phone cards. He says I need a side negocio. I don’t even have a government job. This is why I never have money.
“If I get a job, I won’t have time to write my novels,” I say.
“What novels, Vladi? You haven’t written even one.”
Abel said Natasha had an older sister who died from an infection and a father who left for Santo Domingo and was never heard from again. Her mother works as a cashier at the Carlos Tercero shopping center. He said Natasha reads a lot of books though she didn’t study in the university, and until she broke her leg she had worked as a niñera taking care of the children of a military family in Cubanacán.
“What about the guy she was dancing with when she broke her leg? Was he her boyfriend?”
“¿De qué hablas, Vladi? She wasn’t dancing. Nata never goes out with anyone. She broke it when she fell down the stairs. A neighbor found her on the landing between the second and third floor.”
Natasha didn’t have anyone to take her to have her cast removed so I offered. We left her crutches at home and I carried her down the stairs all the way to Dragones for the botero lines. We found a shared taxi going down Zanja in the direction of the clinic and sat together in the back of that green Ford, our legs pressed together as other passengers climbed in beside us. It was somewhere around La Rampa that I decided I wanted to kiss her. We passed Coppelia and she looked out the wi
ndow past me, licking her lips, saying when she could walk on her own she’d go there for her first ice cream of the summer. I kissed her mouth. The woman on Natasha’s other side looked away. The driver watched us from the mirror. Natasha’s lips were still but she didn’t pull away. I kissed her many more times and when I paused she stared at me but we were quiet until we arrived at our stop and again I carried her, from the road into the clinic.
When the doctor liberated her leg from the plaster, it was pale and thin compared to her other calf, which was golden and muscular. Natasha was embarrassed. The doctor made her practice walking. She was uncertain and wobbled and held my arm tight. The doctor said she had to be careful. Her ankle would be delicate for some time. She should not walk on Havana’s cobblestones and uneven roads alone, he said. “You take care of her,” he told me as we left that day. Natasha held my arm like a security bar and I watched her every step in and out of the taxi back to the Capitolio. When we came to her building she walked on her own to the corner in front of the Teatro Campoamor where some men were stealing sheet metal from the barricades.
“Let’s go in,” she said, and I followed her, because I was just meeting this Natasha of enthusiasm and with wildness in her eyes. We walked past the street thieves, the walls of garbage, and into the theater through a gap that had been ripped through the wooden door blocks. Everyone knew a famous eccentric squatted on the theater’s upper floors. From Abel’s apartment you could see the guy’s laundry hanging from string across what used to be theater balconies. Natasha led me in and we were at the base of the old theater’s concrete horseshoe, overgrown with plants, even trees, and I thought of my grandmother’s old stories about the place, where she’d come to hear her first zarzuela when Havana was still grand and beautiful, before its shredding and abandonment and exodus.
Here, the balconies were lined with pigeons and the orchestra seats, long looted, were occupied by a clan of bony cats. Natasha, still holding me for support, slipped both her arms around me, pressed her chest against mine, and kissed me. We were there so long I managed to lift up her shirt and slide my hands under her skirt into her panties, but then we heard voices from somewhere in the theater and Natasha lost her balance, so I helped her cover up and took her home.
I have another girlfriend named Lily. She lives with her daughter in the apartment her husband left them in three years ago, in the building next to mine just off Línea in Vedado. I live with my parents. They didn’t see the point of having more than one child. They didn’t have the room for a bigger family. They sleep in the one bedroom in our apartment. I sleep on a mattress in a corner of the living room that my mother also uses to give therapeutic massages to private clients though she was educated in Moscow to be a physicist. My father is a cardiologist. He’s hoping to get sent on a doctor exchange to Angola or Brazil so he can defect and get us out of here.
Lily doesn’t care for books. She thinks it’s funny that I want to write them. She wants to fuck almost all the time, even if her daughter is in the next room, and even if her daughter walks in halfway through because she’s hungry, Lily doesn’t want to stop. She got sterilized so she says she’s making up for all her condom years. She’s thirty-five. I’m twenty-seven. Lily’s face is hard from sun and smoking Hollywoods and her hair is thin and limp like thread. Her body is lumpy; her stomach, a rumpled pillowcase. Somehow she’s still beautiful. Sometimes even more beautiful than Natasha who is lean and pointy, sharp shoulders, elbows, and hips, a smooth face as if carved of clay. Sometimes when I’m with Lily, I miss Natasha desperately. Other times I get a feeling of revenge. I speak to her in my mind as I lick Lily’s body and say, You see, Nata, you don’t own me after all.
I am with Lily when Natasha thinks I am writing. This is why she doesn’t call or come looking for me. She wants me to be productive. I don’t even have to convince her to give me the time and space. She read some pages I wrote a long time ago even though I said they were new. She thinks I’m talented. She believes I can be a great writer. I told her the novel I am writing is about love and mystery and the agony of existence. In my mind, my book is all these things but the truth is I haven’t written more than a few sentences. Natasha says it will be the greatest novel ever written. She says they will publish it everywhere and I will be invited around the world to talk about it and be given medals and honors and will meet important people who will think me brilliant. I have already told her I love her so I know she thinks she will be coming with me on all these journeys.
Natasha has no money for books but she is friends with all the dealers at the Plaza de Armas who let her borrow their used copies for a week or two and then she returns them with a smile and a pastry or a candy or even just a kiss on the cheek. They like Natasha because she will sit for hours with them in the shade of the plaza and talk about Barnet or Padura and tell them the man she loves is also a great writer and one day soon his novel will be the most sought-after title on the island.
Here in La Habana Vieja, with her newly borrowed books tucked into her bag, Natasha is tough, confident of her steps, no longer afraid she will twist her ankle. When a shirtless boy of ten or eleven approaches her slowly, eyeing her, then, just as they pass each other on the sidewalk, the boy reaches behind her and slaps her ass with an open palm, Natasha is quicker than he anticipates, grabbing his wrist before he can run off, holding him in place as he kicks and tries to flee, but Natasha slaps him with her free hand, demands to know where his mother is, and vows not to release her grip until the little cochino takes Natasha to his mami and confesses his crime. Here, Natasha doesn’t need me.
Lily doesn’t have to work because her husband sends money from Tampa. He works for a moving company and is saving to bring Lily and her daughter over or maybe just enough to come back and live better. Sometimes she gives me a bit of fula and I use it to take out Natasha. We go to Coppelia, wait in line for whatever disgusting flavor they have that day. Sometimes we go to a movie at the Yara or to Casa de la Música and Natasha presses close against me in the crowd as we watch a band perform. Then I take her home and while her mother sleeps, Natasha sneaks me into her room. She always pretends she’s making a great sacrifice by taking me to bed, like she’s a saint and I’m a devil, not like she’s enjoying it though she doesn’t hide her faces or conceal her moans. But she makes me work for it every time. Not like Lily who never wears underwear, who doesn’t have to be convinced of anything.
“When are you going to let me read your book?” Natasha asks every now and then when we’re in bed together. It’s enough to make me want to get up and leave.
“You know I’m a perfectionist. I don’t want anyone to see it until it’s ready.”
Her friend, who works at a papelería, stole some notebooks for me because Natasha asked her to. I don’t have a computer. Not even a typewriter. I had one but the ink ribbon ran out and I can’t find replacements anywhere. I write in notebooks. Natasha thinks I have dozens full of my writing but it’s more like three or four. In my mind I see stories I want to write, I hear the sentences, see each phrase come together like pearls on a string, but when it comes time to write them they evaporate and I’m left in the four corners of my room, my mother working on some fat, naked body under a towel, or I’m in Lily’s apartment, her daughter talking to one of the dolls her father sent from Florida; Lily, cooking a meal, humming some old tune, smelling of me under her clothes. If I were a better writer, a real writer, I would know how to make Natasha or Lily my muse. But I can’t even do that.
Natasha’s mother is small and fat in the way of most mothers around here. My own mother has stayed thin by kneading people’s bodies all day and my father hates this because he says people think he can’t afford to feed her, which is mostly true. He earns too little. It’s Mamá’s job that lets us eat beyond the Libreta de Abastecimiento, buy imported food at the markets, African fish and Chinese chicken. Natasha’s mother is shaped like a frijol, with curly hair dyed tomato red, a woman who looks like a meal.
She tells Natasha not to read so much. She tells her that instead of babysitting, she should work on stealing one of the husbands who employ her so that she can blackmail him into sending her away to Miami or Madrid. Natasha can’t help confessing these things to me. In the beginning, I could hardly get her to speak, but now I can’t keep her quiet. She wants me to know all her secrets. I hush her with kisses, try to silence her with caresses, opening her legs, letting her feel me, but she wants to talk, every time. I tell her I love her, but that sometimes only fills her with suspicion.
“How can you love me when there’s still so much you don’t know about me?”
“We don’t need to know everything about each other, Nata. I love the you I know.”
This is the wrong thing to say.
“What do you mean there are things we don’t know about each other?”
Nata thinks herself too intellectual to be jealous so I know she won’t allow herself to ask me about other women since I’ve given her no evidence.
“We have our whole lives to discover each other,” I say. “But we only have an hour until your mother gets home from work.”
Natasha’s mother thinks I’m too poor for her daughter. But she likes that I come off as ambitious. Writers and artists and musicians can do well for themselves in this country if they make a name abroad. That’s what Natasha tells her mother. I’m going to be famous and Nata is going to be my pillar and raise our children. Just as soon as I finish my novel we will get married, she tells her mother. That line came from me.
Once my mother said, “I don’t think I approve of you having two girlfriends like you do.”
“Why not?”
“Infidelity is an antiquated model, Vladi. One shouldn’t be so greedy. Just pick one.”
“I wouldn’t know which one to pick.”
“That’s easy. Pick the one without the husband.”