Drown

BOYFRIEND

I should have been careful with the weed. Most people it just fucks up. Me, it makes me sleepwalk. And wouldn’t you know, I woke up in the hallway of our building, feeling like I’d been stepped on by my high school marching band. My ass would have been there all night if the folks in the apartment below hadn’t been having themselves a big old fight at three in the morning. I was too fried to move, at least right away. Boyfriend was trying to snake Girlfriend, saying he needed space, and she was like, Motherfucker, I’ll give you all the space you need. I knew Boyfriend a little. I saw him at the bars and saw some of the girls he used to bring home while she was away. He just needed more space to cheat. Fine, he said, but every time he went for the door she got to crying and would be like, Why are you doing this? They sounded a lot like me and my old girlfriend Loretta, but I swore to myself that I would stop thinking about her ass, even though every Cleopatra-looking Latina in the city made me stop and wish she would come back to me. By the time Boyfriend got himself into the hallway I was already in my apartment. Girlfriend would not stop crying. Twice she stopped, she must have heard me moving around right above her and both times I held my breath until she started up again. I followed her into the bathroom, the two of us separated by a floor, wires and some pipes. She kept saying, Ese fucking pepetón, and washed her face over and over again. It would have broken my heart if it hadn’t been so damn familiar. I guess I’d gotten numb to that sort of thing. I had heart-leather like walruses got blubber.

The next day I told my boy Harold what happened and he said too bad for her.

I guess so.

If I didn’t have my own women problems I’d say let’s go comfort the widow.

She ain’t our type.

The hell she ain’t.

Homegirl was too beautiful, too high-class for a couple of knuckleheads like us. Never saw her in a t-shirt or without jewelry. And her boyfriend, olvídate. That nigger could have been a model; hell, they both could have been models, which was what they probably were, considering that I never heard word one pass between them about a job or a fucking boss. People like these were untouchables to me, raised on some other planet and then transplanted into my general vicinity to remind me how bad I was living. What was worse was how much Spanish they shared. None of my girlfriends ever spoke Spanish, even Loretta of the Puerto Rican attitudes. The closest thing for me was this black chick who spent three years in Italy. She liked to talk that shit in bed, and said she’d gone with me because I reminded her of some of the Sicilian men she’d known, which was why I never called her again.

Boyfriend came around a couple of times that week for his things and, I guess, to finish the job. He was a confident prick. He listened to what she had to say, arguments that had taken her hours to put together, and then he would sigh and say it didn’t matter, he needed his space, punto. She let him fuck her every time, maybe hoping that it would make him stay but you know, once somebody gets a little escape velocity going, ain’t no play in the world that will keep them from leaving. I would listen to them going at it and I would be like, Damn, ain’t nothing more shabby than those farewell fucks. I know. Me and Loretta had enough of those to go around. Difference was, we never talked the way these two would. About our days. Not even when we were cool together. We’d lay there and listen to the world outside, to the loud boys, the cars, the pigeons. Back then I didn’t have a clue what she was thinking but now I know what to pencil into all those empty thought bubbles. Escape. Escape.

These two had a thing about the bathroom. Each one of his visits ended up there. Which was fine by me, it was where I could hear them best. I don’t know why I started following her life, but it seemed like a good thing to do. Most of the time I thought people, even at their worst, were pretty fucking boring. I guess I wasn’t busy with anything else. Especially not women. I was taking time off, waiting for the last of my Loretta wreckage to drift out of sight.

The bathroom. Girlfriend talked a mile a minute about her day, how she saw a fistfight on the C train, how somebody liked her necklace, and Boyfriend, with his smooth Barry White voice, just kept going, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They’d shower together and if she wasn’t talking she was going down on him. All you would hear down there was the water smacking the bottom of the tub and him going, Yeah. Yeah. He wasn’t sticking around, though. That was obvious. He was one of those dark-skinned smooth-faced brothers that women kill for, and I knew for a fact, having seen his ass in action at the local spots, that he liked to get over on the white-girls. She didn’t know nothing about his little Rico Suave routine. It would have wrecked her. I used to think those were the barrio rules, Latinos and blacks in, whites out — a place we down cats weren’t supposed to go. But love teaches you. Clears your head of any rules. Loretta’s new boy was Italian, worked on Wall Street. When she told me about him we were still going out. We were on the Promenade and she said to me, I like him. He’s a hard worker.

No amount of heart-leather could stop something like that from hurting.

After one of their showers, Boyfriend never came back. No phone calls, no nothing. She called a lot of her friends, ones she hadn’t spoken to in the longest. I survived through my boys; I didn’t have to call out for help. It was easy for them to say, Forget her sellout ass. That’s not the sort of woman you need. Look how light you are — no doubt she was already shopping for the lightest.

Girlfriend spent her time crying, either in the bathroom or in front of the TV. I spent my time listening and calling around for a job. Or smoking or drinking. A bottle of rum and two sixes of Presidente a week.

One night I got the cojones to ask her up for café, which was mighty manipulative of me. She hadn’t had much human contact the whole month, except with the delivery guy from the Japanese restaurant, a Colombian dude I always said hi to, so what the hell was she going to say? No? She seemed glad to hear my name and when she threw open the door I was surprised to see her looking smart and watchful. She said she’d be right up and when she sat down across from me at the kitchen table she had on makeup and a rose-gold necklace.

You have a lot more light in your apartment than I do, she said.

Which was a nice call. About all I had in the apartment was light.

I played Andrés Jiménez for her — you know, Yo quiero que mi Borinquén sea libre y soberana—and then we drank a pot of café. El Pico, I told her. Nothing but the best. We didn’t have much to talk about. She was depressed and tired and I had the worst gas of my life. Twice I had to excuse myself. Twice in an hour. She must have thought that bizarre as hell but both times I came out of the bathroom she was staring deeply into her café, the way the fortune-tellers will do back on the Island. Crying all the time had made her more beautiful. Grief will do that sometimes. Not for me. Loretta had left months ago and I still looked like hell. Having Girlfriend in the apartment only made me feel shabbier. She picked up a cheeb seed from a crack in the table and smiled.

Do you smoke? I asked.

It makes me break out, she said.

Makes me sleepwalk.

Honey will stop that. It’s an old Caribbean cure. I had a tío who would sleepwalk. One teaspoon a night took it out of him.

Wow, I said.

That night, she put on a free-style tape, Noël maybe, and I could hear her moving around her apartment. I wouldn’t have put it past her to have been a dancer.

I never tried the honey and she never came back. Whenever I saw her on the stairs we would trade hi’s but she never slowed down to talk, never gave a smile or any other kind of encouragement. I took that as a hint. At the end of the month she got her hair cut short. No more straighteners, no more science fiction combs.

I like that, I told her. I was coming back from the liquor store and she was on her way out with a woman friend.

Makes you look fierce.

She smiled. That’s exactly what I wanted.