Say Her Name (25 page)

Yes, self-pity. Why the fuck not.

But I could fight it. I could still be a husband and a dad. Ana Eva was twenty-six. Wasn’t that too young for me? Hadn’t Aura and I managed to push age difference to its workable limit? We might even have become an Alpha couple. Aura, with her Ivy League PhD and blooming bilingual literary career, was going to be extremely hirable, in New York, Mexico, or anywhere. I’d had a decent job, not bad
paying, my salary padded by contracts for books which, whatever else you might say about them, reflected an energetic engagement with the world. Now I would have to start over. Ana Eva was an admirable, intelligent, hardworking young woman. She wanted to be an elementary or middle-school teacher. She had an interest in literature. If we got married, she’d be able to get her green card. She insisted she didn’t mind our age difference. She claimed there was no meaningful difference between her age and Aura’s. Because of her school and work schedule, it wasn’t easy for us to find time to be together, but soon Ana Eva was spending all her free time with me. I took her to restaurants in Brooklyn, mostly in our neighborhood, usually pizza and pasta places. She knew about wine from being a waitress, and liked to pick what to order. When we went to the sushi place on Court Street that Aura and I used to go to and that I hadn’t been back to since, the Israeli owner greeted us as if he was surprised and delighted to see us again, and I realized he was mistaking Ana Eva for Aura. Sometimes she came to my apartment to study, or we met in Wi-Fi cafés to do “homework” together. I bought her presents, though I didn’t go crazy—I didn’t buy her a new laptop to replace her slow and outmoded one. We kissed on our first date, made love on our second. I cooked for her at my apartment, using pots and pans and utensils that had been untouched since Aura had last touched them, feeling like I was rousing them from their stoic mourning, forcing them to submit to a betrayal. Shut up, pots and pans, this is part of
moving on,
like we’re all supposed to. I phoned my closest friends in New York and Mexico to tell them that I’d fallen in love, and waited like a hungry dog for words of congratulations and approval; if I discerned even a trace of skepticism in their voices, I became belligerent. I told Ana Eva that I loved her, and she said that she loved me. She lived with two other immigrant City College students in Kensington, both of them young men, one from Turkestan, the other from Slovenia. She’d answered an ad for a roommate on a bulletin board at school. The two boys shared one room, with separate beds, and she had the other. I didn’t like to go there, not to that neighborhood, where
there wasn’t much to do at night, and definitely not to that drably male and peculiar apartment. So we went to my place. We made love on our bed, under the angel, by the wedding dress hung over the mirror, the bureaus and closets still stuffed with Aura’s clothes, jewelry, cosmetics, bags, and shoes. Didn’t this bother Ana Eva? She said that it didn’t, that she thought it was beautiful, that she felt connected to Aura, that she was sure Aura was happy we’d found each other. I promised I would take the dress down and decide what to do with all Aura’s stuff after the second anniversary; Ana Eva said that would be fine. I tried to remember to toss the wedding rings on my chain over my shoulder when we made love. She liked to inspect my tattoos, and to ask questions about them. All but one were the result of an impulsive off-my-rocker three-day spree back in late August, done by a young female tattoo artist named Consuelo who worked at a parlor in the Zona Rosa, who always wore a loose-fitting black leather vest over her bare cinnamon-brown skin and blueberry-hued tattoos; the smell of her skin lotions and musky armpits like a pleasurable drug as she leaned over me, working, her long black hair tickling my skin in mesmerizing contrast to the burning-pulsing tattooing needle. She listened to me like a shrink would have, processing my vaguest suggestions into tattoo ideas, the quiet, concise, almost Chinese-sounding patter of her voice drawing those suggestions out of me. I’d already had one tattoo, a now faded one on my upper arm of a Posada skeleton riding a comet that I got in Mexico, in the eighties, when I’d wanted to mark my “rebirth” after the end of a relationship that I barely remembered now. The new tattoos included one on my forearm that read
Natalia 17/1/09
—Natalia was what Aura wanted to name our baby if she was a girl, Bruno if a boy, and I’d decided that she was going to be a girl, that she was going to be Natalia, and that the seventeenth of January, 2009, was going to be her date of birth (now, in bed with Ana Eva, it was only months away); over my heart, the image of a heart cracked in pieces, 25/
7/2007
written over it and
Hecho en Mexico
beneath; on my rib cage, a pretty line drawing of Aura in her wedding dress with a guadalupana corona of stars, and our
wedding date,
20/8/05;
on a shoulder blade, the sad clown with a dark teardrop falling from his eye and the words,
laugh now, cry later
; and tattooed in tight cursive script, like a necklace beneath my collarbone, these words from “Exequy on his Wife,” by Henry King, Bishop of Chichester:

ev’ry Howre a step towards Thee

But you don’t really want to die, said Ana Eva.

Sometimes I really did, I think, Ana Eva, until I met you.

I brought my copy of “Exequy on his Wife” to bed and we went over the poem. It gave me a way to talk to Ana Eva about what had happened: Aura’s death, my guilt, her mother’s blame, how love survives loss and the challenge of how to carry that love forward, and, of course, the language of the poem itself, the expressing of seemingly obvious and eternal grief emotions that probably can’t be expressed any better or more truly than they are in that poem, though it was written more than three hundred years ago. This is why we need beauty, to illuminate even what has most broken us, I said, sounding a bit like my old teacher self. Not to help us transcend or transform it into something else, but first and foremost to help us see it. Ana Eva solemnly nodded, the respectful student, and said quietly, Yes, to help us see it.

So take that you fucking Sméagol, you and your Latino straw man marvelous quirkiness of love, go sodomize yourself with your fucking sock puppet, you idiot pendejo!

Ana Eva gaped at me. What had set this off? Why this outburst of ranting only seconds after she’d just been so sympathetic about the poem?

She was frightened. She’d drawn back into a corner of the bed. What’s the matter? Was it her? Why was I screaming at her about some Sméagol?

Oh Ana Eva, no, no, it has nothing to do with you. I’m sorry. Something Sméagol, a book critic, wrote. He gave us the evil eye on the subway. He fucking killed Aura, not me.

Oh Paquito, cariño—she lithely crawled toward me over the bed. You didn’t kill Aura, nobody did. It was an accident. Ana Eva cradled my head in her hands, while I sank into appalled remorse. I never used to rave like that in front of Aura. With her, I’d held myself, always, to a higher, more self-controlled standard of behavior. Once, very early on in our love, I’d gotten into a fight with an Arab taxi driver who hadn’t wanted to take us to Brooklyn, and though he did drive us back to Brooklyn, inside the taxi our argument, a heated trading of insults, had escalated and finally blown up and we’d ended up standing in the pouring rain outside the taxi in the Cadman Plaza exit ready to fistfight, screaming curses at each other, and then the driver ordered Aura and her friend Lola out of the taxi, too, and though I shouted at them to stay inside they obeyed the driver and got out into the rain and Lola ran off into the sparse woods off the exit to hide. The taxi drove off. Aura and I went into the woods to look for Lola, shouting her name, and finally found her crouching like a drenched kitten behind a tree. Lola had run off to hide, she told us, because she’d never witnessed such violent hatred as between that cabdriver and me; she said it had terrified her. Soaking wet, we waited for another cab. Later, Aura said, There’s nothing more classless than people who fight with taxi drivers and waiters and workers in stores. My stepfather used to do that and I’m not going to put up with a boyfriend who does. If you ever fight with a taxi driver again, Francisco, I’ll leave you, I mean it! I never did again, not once. From then on I was a docile, polite taxi passenger, protesting only when it was occasionally called for, in a respectful and moderate manner. Love does change your behavior, it does force you to aim for a higher standard. You can change. But look at me, raving about Sméagol, raving the way my father used to.

Ana Eva asked me once what Natalia’s full name would have been, and I told her, Well, Natalia Goldman. But there’d also been the possibility, I told her, that we were going to use Aura’s last name, Estrada, or even my mother’s maiden name, Molina. Aura and I had talked about that. The kid was only going to be a quarter Jewish. Why saddle her with the planet’s most Jewish-sounding surname?
Why should Natalia go through life always having to put up with wiseass remarks about Goldman Sachs!

I think you should be proud to honor your father by using his name, said Ana Eva.

You do, do you, I said. Well, I don’t particularly second that emotion. I had a memory of my father a few years before he died, standing on the plush baby blue carpet at the top of the stairs in our suburban Massachusetts house, and ranting: My dumb fucking father, that stupid Russian peasant, comes into the country and lets them stick him with a fucking Yid name like Goldman. He was a goddamned baker; he could have said, Give me the name Baker. He made pickles, too. You know what? Call me Pickle, why the hell not? Or I’ll hang on to the name I already have, thank you very fucking much. But Goldman, no, thank you. Then the genius goes and changes his own
first
name from Moishe to Morton!

I had been stunned. For more than eight decades my father had stewed with resentment over an ugly surname that wasn’t his, that had been arbitrarily imposed on him, and he only let this be known after that coma had loosened screws in his brain. That was when I found out that in Russia my grandfather’s last name, our family’s true last name, had been Malamudovich. I did like that surname much more than Goldman. Why couldn’t we have kept it? I agreed with my dad, what was the matter with that dumbfuck Russian peasant? Malamudovich Molina—I liked that even more. If I could do it all over again, I’d call myself Francisco Malamudovich Molina, my true name.

But I can’t even say it, said Ana Eva.

Paco M&M, then.

I still like Goldman better, she said. It’s like a superhero name. The man who is made of gold.

Yeah? Well, what about Pickleman? The man who is made of pickle.

When I took Ana Eva to Katz’s Deli because she’d never had a pastrami sandwich, she agreed to split one. It’s like Proust’s cookie, I mumbled, taking my first bite. She asked, Who’s Proust? What? A
pastrami cookie? She didn’t even finish her half of the sandwich. I’d begun to measure what Ana Eva said against what Aura had said, or would have. Ana Eva plaintively asked one day, Do I ever say anything funny? I don’t, do I? Oh, I wish I knew how to be funny.

The qualities I’d liked best in Ana Eva at first, such as her tranquil disposition, began to irritate me. She had that frankness about sex that I’d noticed in other young women. But her appetite for daily fucking was much greater than Aura’s. Aura always had a zillion things on her mind and a zillion things to do. You could make out with Aura in the middle of the day and it would be delicious but it wasn’t required to lead directly to fucking. Ana Eva had a methodical approach to existence in which everything else waited patiently in line behind sex, and the lines formed daily. When you made out with her, she quickly grew shivery and hot, and if you put your hand on her breast, or inside her thigh, she’d squirm away like a virginal schoolgirl, and say something like, ¿Qué
ha-ces
? in the most breathy, girly way, and press her mouth to yours even harder, or else she’d push you away a little and suddenly lift her shirt or her dress off over her head and reach back to snap off her bra, freeing her small pretty breasts with their hard dark nipples big as bumble-bees—that moment always made me catch my breath. She had long, skinny fawnlike legs, and smooth, thin arms, and it seemed as if I was spending half my waking time entangled in those limbs, in their sinuous liveliness, the long shivers and twitches that traveled up and down them. Sometimes she’d come into the apartment, drop right down onto her knees, and unzip me. I began to feel that she had too much sexual hunger and energy for me, that I couldn’t keep up, and I began to attribute that to the difference in our ages rather than to a difference in our natures, though it was probably both. One night I told her that I was too tired for sex and just wanted to go to sleep, and she got angry. She didn’t just sigh impatiently or hold herself stiffly apart from me in the bed. Her eyes flashed like a knife fighter’s, she wanted explanations. It was the first time I’d seen her so demanding. I’m just tired, I repeated. I can’t necessarily fuck every night, I said, and maybe I don’t even want to. Why did I
want her to sleep over, then? What was the point, she asked, if we weren’t going to make love?

From that night on I began having resentful sorts of thoughts and feelings about Ana Eva. I grew short with her, and she must have realized that I was often bored. I felt the depression that had more or less constantly accompanied me since Aura died descending again, but now it felt heavier, murkier, with a whole charged atmosphere that went right through my skin and corroded my nerve endings. One evening Ana Eva and I were in the kitchen talking, and I realized someone had left a bottle of poison out on the counter, a bottle that looked like it was mezcal but that held poison, and couldn’t have been more clearly marked anyway, with the word
VENENO
and black skulls on it, and I said, This shouldn’t be left out on the counter, and I picked up the bottle and put it away in a cabinet. Ana Eva asked, Why are you putting the grapefruit juice away in the cabinet? I heard what she said, realized it was a carton of grapefruit juice as soon as she spoke and that I was indeed putting it away in a cabinet instead of in the refrigerator, but when I looked at her it was as if she were far away and in some other room behind a wall of smoked glass and I said, with a sense of futilely pushing words out into some too gelatinous atmosphere, Because it’s poison, Ana Eva. I think that was when they began, those diffuse daytime hallucinations, my eyes open and able to register who and what was around me, my ears hearing what anyone was saying, but somehow I was also dreaming at the same time, dream images spilling into the day like crude oil from a sunken tanker. One night we went to a movie, a story about teenaged runaway lovers. At the end the girl dies, and it’s the boy’s fault; the girl is in the back of the ambulance, her white dress covered in blood, her soft round cheeks, life slowly fading from her eyes, and I began to shake all over, I was muttering and then almost shouting,
No, no! Don’t! NO!
I stood up and staggered down the aisle, biting the heel of my hand and crying, Ana Eva trailing me, holding on to me though I kept walking, pulling her along, and didn’t stop, didn’t say a word until finally I found
myself sitting alone at the downstairs bar in Rexo with five drained mezcal shots lined up in front of me, staring out the window at Avenida Nuevo Leon, devoid of traffic, green-tinged by the street lamps, four streets feeding into it at different angles, one of Mexico City’s deadliest traffic intersections taking the night off,
the haunted intersection
. A few years before, my friend Yunior, visiting from New York, had stood looking across the street at the corner Rexo is on and the grimy curb in front of it and said, Someone died there once, and I’d known instantly that he was right. The adrenaline and panic triggered by the movie’s ending had finally drained out of me, replaced by an alcohol-soothed emptiness and a loneliness that felt like forever. I stared through the bar window out at the glowing pavement of the mostly deserted avenue and thought, This is never going to end. But the bar was on Houston Street, not in Mexico, and they were tequila shots and Ana Eva was sitting silently on a bar stool, half asleep, beside me.