Chapter 8
Sophie in jeans and a frost-white eyelet blouse sighs into the early May afternoon, Emma’s birthday. To test for doneness, she slips a toothpick in the mound of each chocolate layer. Working late the night before – tango lessons at Holy Family, then waiting tables at Iris, from whence she brought home over two hundred dollars in tips – has rendered her still sleepy. Her bones want to melt; she feels like Chanti’s Silly-Putty that he fiddles with when he’s trying to quit smoking.
She imagines what she might wear to the party – what’s she’s going for? Demure, good daughter, baker of birthday cakes? Seductive wife? In spite of the raw weather Sophie has managed to tan by spending twenty minutes in a string bikini out in the courtyard on any recent sunny day. No matter how cool. Sun falls at noon on the picnic table and she lies there on a yoga mat, determined to brown up. She thinks about Chanti’s body while she’s on the picnic table, about candlelight on her own skin, and she knows she’s vain – if she ever forgets, Liz will remind her. She wallows – Chanti teases – in the carnal. One day last week he stuck a postcard in the corner of the bathroom mirror: a black and white photo of a broken-down building with a corrugated roof; the sign on the building reads CARNAL GARAGE. He loves it when she wallows, when she walks around the bedroom naked or when he wakes up with her mouth on him.
Emma’s potholder mitts are thick and frayed; Sophie sticks her hands into them and slides the round cakes from the oven; the oven heat takes the chill off her bare arms.
As long as Sophie can recall, Emma has dreamed aloud of summer birthday parties. Other years, hail popped on cars like polka-dots. Sleet poured forth, gray as concrete. Today isn’t so bad.
Joe and Chanti and Benny are down below in the courtyard, dressed in insulated work shirts, installing electric braziers in the trees to keep everyone warm. Emma has walked to the health center for a swim.
The party begins at seven o’clock, but Sophie imagines that Liz and Neil and Tommy will be early, a nuisance. She should be ready to deal with them, to offer cable TV to Tommy and a drink to Liz and Neil. Or maybe they will want to cruise around the neighborhood and see if there are Cinco de Mayo events still happening.
Sophie has noticed a creeping conversion in herself: since getting married she is more conscious of the whereabouts and needs of everyone in the family. As if against her will she is becoming the center of family life or domesticity. Somehow responsible for the well-being of her father and mother and Chanti and the cats. She cut an egg out of the cake recipe for the sake of her father’s cholesterol.
She shakes off her new role with tango. In Chanti’s arms, dancing in slow mo to the tart Spanish guitar, the moan of violins. The exhibitionist in Sophie flowers at tango lessons. Last night Chanti called out the steps to their students who watched from a ragged, tentative circle. The checkerboard tile floor was a little gritty, not smooth as it should be. Buzzing florescent lights imbued their faces with a sickly tinge. On the far wall, a water-stained print of Mother Teresa was directly in Sophie’s line of sight. But even with all that distraction, she felt zips of electric current with the pressure of Chanti’s hand on her back, his response to her ocho, her fluidity, the sharp ping of her dress heels on the floor. His cologne and the chemical reaction of it with his skin when they dance seduce her: the citric-tang of him. It’s all foreplay.
Late last night, they made exhausted love in a binge of moon glow.
Ambrosia of chocolate cake fills the kitchen. She flips through mail lying on the counter, tickled when she sees their names linked on an envelope: Chanti and Sophie Gonzales. Santiago Natividad Gonzales. Was it Uncle Leo who predicted she would marry someone from the neighborhood?
“We’ll christen that courtyard when your folks go away,” Chanti says, coming in the kitchen door. Everyone says that lust disappears, but so far, that has not been the case with Sophie and Chanti.
Blue pastel smears across his forehead, remnant of the art class he teaches at Casa Verde. Sophie grins, flirts. “You read my mind.”
Chanti dips into the fridge and takes out a Corona. He offers it to her, but she shakes her head no, with a shiver.
“Where’s Benny?” Sophie likes Benny; she always has.
“He went home. He’ll be back.”
“Is he down?”
“Not so much. And your Dad’s in a good mood.” Chanti gestures with the beer bottle, a silent toast, in the general direction of Joe, outside.
“I’m glad he’s better. For her sake. It’s been a while.”
“My mother, she always says: ’When you get down in the dumps, you hitch a ride there. But you have to walk all the way back home.’”
Sophie pulls a stepstool to the cupboards, climbs up, and takes down a stack of gold-rimmed dessert plates.
“My class’s going to be good, Soph.”
“You’re a saint to work down there.” She shoves the stepstool back into the corner. “It gives me the creeps.”
Chanti shrugs. “Hey. Monkey-man was there.”
Monkey-man. A boy who paints illegal murals when he’s not running with his gang. The Trib ran a feature on him in January. “Monkey-man. Junior Morales. Those guys.”
“Any girls?”
“One. One girl. Ju-Ju. She’s tough. She brought a portfolio along. Drawings of kids she did from photographs.” Chanti drinks deep from the bottle, leaning against the counter. “I got a black kid in there. I don’t even know how he heard about it. And my cousin Tony – he’s taking it.”
Antonio Manuel Gonzales. Sophie thinks of him as damaged. Seventeen years old, with a threateningly seductive grin and a mean streak. His mother went back to Mexico and his father went to prison in North Dakota. Tony lives in Little Village with a second cousin who needed help with the rent.
And then Chanti says: “So what’re you wearing?”
“You’ll see. A surprise.” She won’t upstage Liz. She wants Emma’s birthday to be about Emma, not hard feelings.
“Sophie loves surprises.”
She stops and takes a sip of his beer, after all, to be friendly. “And you?”
“A white shirt,” he shrugs. “Clean jeans.”
“You’ve got this --” Sophie waggles a finger in front of her own forehead to indicate the blue smear.
“Hey, sleepy-head,” Chanti proposes, “want to lie down for a few minutes?” He strips off his insulated shirt and drapes it over the back of a chair. A Saint Chris medal gleams against his white undershirt. Chanti can tell you that Saint Christopher protects travelers and bachelors, boatmen, bookbinders, bus drivers, cab drivers, epileptics, fruit dealers, gardeners, porters, and sailors, and anyone at all against lightning, hailstorms, toothache, and sudden death. He knows more about the saints than any Catholic, lapsed or not.
They go upstairs to their hideaway and close the door and lie down fully clothed. Heat from the oven has risen from downstairs and they are warm and still they nest together. Here she is no longer responsible for everyone. Nagging thoughts of Liz fall away; all emotional rehearsal ends. Chanti smells like light sweat and the outdoors. Like asking and answering small questions, this, too, is one of the unexpected pleasures of marriage – the cocoon of napping together. Right before she falls asleep, her thoughts come down to one: If lust does disappear, this will be a fine consolation prize.
Chapter 9 “Pete Rose and Bill Clinton are cut from the same cloth,” Joe muses aloud to Emma. She’s dressed up – purple whatever, iris-like, he’s sure there is a specific name for what Emma wears, some sort of exotic get-up Tiff brought back from Nepal, a tunic, that’s it, with slim pants underneath – and Joe aims to match her volume, in summer-weight wool slacks and a crisp pink dress shirt and tie. “They’re like blood brothers. They both went in for that wigged-out hair.” No one, not even Emma, knows about the Warhol print of Pete Rose, one brick in the foundation of his retirement. Too large for his safe deposit box, it’s kept in a fiberglass tube in his closet. Emma has the bathroom door ajar. Joe sits on the edge of the bed, one sock on, the other in hand, his loafers shiny, just polished. This is a moment he prolongs, a moment he savors, private preparations for a public evening. A chore awaits him; he promised Sophie he would set up the bar. Even as he castigates Pete Rose and Clinton – a rumination that he’s refining over time – Joe senses a cautious optimism about the evening. The men will be cordial, a newsy lot – with opinions about this and that, the new Spiderman movie, the hunger strike just ended in Little Village, a bit of civil disobedience conjured to induce the school board to build a promised high school (Uncle Leo will know all about it), the Church’s trouble coming out, Le Pen and his diabolical take on history – all of it predictable, and that amplifies his good will. They won’t disagree about much. They’re all registered Democrats, even if Sophie did throw her vote away on Nader. Not that Joe has anything against Nader besides his colossal and obvious inability to win. Joe wants a winner. Like Clinton. If only Clinton had kept it in his pants for eight years. Was that too much to ask? The media sharks aren’t the gentlefolk of the sixties when Kennedy was poking God knows who. Joe wouldn’t say poking in mixed company, in front of his girls, (even though they curse freely in front of him, fuck this, fuck that) but the word pleases him. His father would have used it. Rant on, you old fart, he tells himself: his way of getting it under control. Sophie helped Joe find a toast for Emma. A quote from a novel: ‘Life is short and often stingy; feast the heart with what it craves.’ Chanti has burned a CD of danceable tunes – “Misty” and “Embraceable You,” songs Joe wants to pin down, as if they were written for this night only, he won’t want the music to trigger memories – and he intends to dance with Emma. Sunset sky lights the bedroom and Joe thinks: I’m glad to be alive. Out loud he says, “I’m better.” And he is. It is a moment of clarity. The early-April anniversary of his brother’s death is fading. The anniversary of his father’s is still a few months away. Emma sticks her head around the corner, a silvery uncapped lipstick in hand, its tip violet in the bathroom light. Smiling beneficently she says, “I’ve noticed that.” The mechanical hum of traffic waxes and wanes, horns chopping, and in the interstices, far away Cinco de Mayo, a string of firecrackers set off now and then, a mariachi band walking by. Joe pulls on his sock and slips into his loafers. Emma steps out of the bathroom and presents herself for his approval. “Lovely. Lovely,” Joe says. She flies to the bed and plants herself beside him, legs jutting straight out, the nubby fabric of her outfit cross-hatched with light, and she knocks the toes of her shoes together. She reminds him of a young Katherine Hepburn. “What’s on your mind?” “Our trip, of course. Just planning it wakes me up, arouses me.” With that, nothing is negotiable. She wants something from him he can’t give. They have a deal, but still he can’t feign enthusiasm about going on the trip. All his notions – camaraderie and peaches and sunshine – leave him, his hope a washout, and he wonders if he’ll have to fend off Neil like a dog with a bone insisting that Home Plate should go on-line. He wonders if Neil’s boy Tommy will drive him nuts. Or if Liz and Sophie will wrangle. The worst, he thinks the worst. And Emma sees it. Tears spring into her eyes. Peggy Lee noses under Joe’s hand to be petted, and he lifts her close to his chest and Emma says, “Your shirt, Joe – “ Peggy Lee is his princess, his love, and Joe lies back on the bed and allows her to settle against him, while Emma squelches a sigh, gets up, and goes on, following her own advice to act as if. As if a moment between them hadn’t gone awry. As if she felt free to talk about her passions, her foolish excess. Their losses hang in the married gloom like one of those old love songs he can’t quite remember the words to.