The Genealogies: Chapter 8, That Obscure Object of Desire

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood

Marcelo woke up with Jessie curled up on his chest, her pudgy arms snaked around his midriff, holding him closely. He stretched carefully, not wanting to wake her up. Carefully, again, he unwrapped himself from her, slowly getting out from under her arms, slipping out of the bed, naked, the ceiling fan blowing cool air on his body. The room was still dark, the curtains drawn tightly against the morning sun. He looked at the clock—9 a.m. Well, that’s par for the course, isn’t it? When he and Jessie had first gotten together, they rarely stayed in bed past 8 on their days off. There was always a bit of the sleepy morning sex to start things, then a hurried rush to shower and dress and get out and do something. Staying home was never an option; they had to be on the go-go-go all weekend, shopping, movies, drives, eating, something. Jessie was a dynamo of energy, contained in a fluctuating rubenesque body. At first it didn’t bother him. Everything with her was new, and he hadn’t had a real relationship since Elizabeth, so it was pleasant having an on-call buddy with whom to do things. The fact that they fucked was an added bonus. If she wanted to keep up a pace on their weekends together that guaranteed two too-swiftly passing days, well, it wasn’t too much of a burden, was it? Sure, he missed his lazy Sunday mornings, reading the Times, listening to Harry Shearer on KCRW. But there were compensations, weren’t there? Jessie had been the best girlfriend he had ever had.

This wasn’t an idle assertion, or a statement that mutated with every passing assignation. Jessie was, truthfully, the first lover of his adulthood, the first woman whom he approached shorn of the expectations and romantic yearnings of his youth. By the time Jessie got him, he had been relieved of those notions.

“Marcelo’s women,” Maria told Jessie one day. “I’m not saying he’s a slut, or anything. I mean, he kind of is, but I’m sure you figured that out from the first. But he does love women.”

“Is that why his best friend is a woman?”

“That, and because I put up with him.”

Marcelo’s Women. The Women Who Know Marcelo. It was a long list.

Marcelo always had a push-pull relationship with women. More pull than push. Rarely did he push a woman away, neither out of his bed nor away from his friendship. One of his earliest memories was of a girl in first grade. Her name was Rosemary; she wore her hair in a Dorothy Hamill bob, and her face was beatifically cute. She lived in the same building as he did, and he was in love with her. Of course, he didn’t know it was love. He didn’t know that he loved Mamá, or Papá. He didn’t know love yet, at 6. But it was love. He felt as safe with her as he did with his parents, looked forward to her in the mornings as much as he looked forward to his parents in the evenings. For all the other boys, girls were icky and to be avoided. Not for him, though. He couldn’t get enough of her, sitting next to her at break time, eating lunch with her, him in his sweater and clip-on tie, her in her plaid jumper and starched white blouse. He shared his crayons with her, gave her his milk when she finished hers, did everything a 6-year-old could do to cleave her to himself. The day his family moved 10 blocks north, and thus to a new, closer school, he was heartbroken. Rosemary stood on the stoop of their building, looking at him as he and Mamá started the walk to catch the train uptown, Papá and Carlos riding in the moving truck, waving, not crying, but with a sad, forlorn look on her face. Even as an adult—even that morning, standing naked in the bathroom!—he remembered that look, and remembered himself blubbering quietly, Mamá’s hand consolingly laid on his little shoulder, herding him to their new home. Rosemary was the first woman he had lost.

At first, he tried to make Mamá take him to see her back in the old environs. “Playdates” would be set up, long before the word had ever been conceived by over-harried, quality-time-obsessed boomers. And, at first, everything went grandly. Rosemary lit up when her mother opened the door and there stood Marcelo, dressed in his Sunday best, which was always a mistake as they’d invariably get into some sort of mess. However, soon he made friends at his new school, and there were new girls to take his fancy, and the need to go see Rosemary grew less and less, until slowly, in a fading light, he stopped asking Mamá to take him back to the old neighborhood, forcing her to make excuses when Rosemary’s mother would call, and slowly, like the slow roil of the Hudson, Rosemary faded away, a childish infatuation, not worth dwelling over, especially not when there was this whole different world to discover.

His new school, and Carlos’, was the School of the Assumption, right athwart the Church of the Assumption, both built in an old world Gothic style, much more impressive than the suburban-moderne St. Iggy’s where Marcelo would go to high school. The church had gothic arches and stained glass windows; inside, the ceilings vaulted up to heaven, saints nestled in cornices along the walls, hundreds of candles perpetually burned, lit by old abuelitas wearing black mantillas. The rector was Monsignor Flaherty, tall and balding, and no one would have ever thought of him the things people routinely thought about priests now—“Watch out, you never know, you can’t even trust men of God.” No, Monsignor Flaherty was an old Irishman, who was slowly learning a smattering of Spanish and desperately pulling Spanish-speaking priests into the parish so that his quickly changing flock wouldn’t be cast adrift, tempted by other, more robust faiths. When he had been assigned to Assumption the Irish and the Jews were just moving out, across the River to Jersey, or up around Pelham Bay, staking their piece of the good life, a yard, a two-car garage, to be replaced in the tenements and the housing projects by other strivers, other seekers after that elusive dream, the Dominicans in their legions, the blacks up from Harlem. Monsignor Flaherty knew change when he saw it, and he wasn’t one to be cowed by it. Half the charges in the school weren’t even Catholic, but that was no matter. Even Protestants deserved the best Catholic education he and the sisters and lay teachers could provide.

Against his wishes, even against his better judgment, Marcelo soon found himself, at age 7, the center of a little schoolboy gang. They had no name for themselves—well, occasionally, “The Musketeers”—but they were identifiable. They hung out together at all times, of course mixing with other cliques, but always as a group. There was Mario, the only other Cuban boy in his class, and Alfredo, a Puerto Rican boy who looked whiter than an Irishman in a January fog, and Jean-Michel, a Haitian and the only actual black Catholic in the school. They were a tight bunch, taking lunch together, always forming up a side in basketball or curb-ball or Chinese handball, waiting around together after school until parents or older siblings or other assorted relatives came to collect them. These were Marcelo’s first real friends, the friends of his childhood, and as he progressed with them through grade after grade, he couldn’t think of doing anything without them. When high-school, and after that college, dimly reared into his consciousness, vague shapes over the horizon, he was convinced that they would tackle them together, choosing the same high-schools, choosing the same colleges, choosing four sisters for wives if it came to that. His first grade friends, much like Rosemary, were vapors of memories, ghostly precursors for the true friendships he formed at Assumption—or “School of Up The Ass” as they would uncharitably call it afterwards. They fought, as children are wont, but quickly reconciled afterwards, a bond of brotherhood—deeper than the one they shared with their flesh and blood brothers—enmeshing them. And no one could ever join their crew. It would have ruined the perfect symmetry of the four of them, a fifth wheel, a third leg, a sixth finger. They considered themselves special, better than the other crews, somehow nobler, and though they outwardly maintained a degree of humility, that certitude always burned in them.

The gangs whirled around each other, some in amity, some not. But the one thing they all shared—well, the boys, at any rate, in those early days—was a fear and open dislike for girls. Girls were not to be touched unless chased after and swatted hard during a game of tag. Girls were not to be spoken to unless in mocking derision. Girls were other, and lesser. Marcelo, of course, had a different opinion, one that he found hard to articulate, one that he was fearful of expounding upon. Rosemary’s ghost still worked some salutary influence on him.

One winter’s day, a ravenous gaggle of boys, Marcelo’s buddies among them, Marcelo in the midst of them, were chasing after a squealing flock of girls, clouds of white misty breath trailing out behind the herd. Whether it was a game or some other sort of boyish torture Marcelo couldn’t recall in later years. Memories become so blurred, conflated, excised and snipped back together, made into composites, like a novel turned into a two-hour film, when really a sprawling trilogy would come just close to encapsulating its myriad threads and digressions. So, the circumstances of the chase vanished into the mind’s dustbin. But what Marcelo remembered—or what he remembered remembering—was stopping mid-chase, after two of the girls had stopped running and were huddled next to a wall of an adjacent building, panting and wheezing in the cold air, stopping before them and looking at them, the baby fat beginning to dissipate, giving way to something that would become their adult selves, and apologizing. Not with any words—he was as yet not brave enough to do that—but by his mere cessation of the chase. He realized, at that moment, that he didn’t want to torment girls. It seemed silly, and there was something alluring about girls. All the seminal people in his life were women—mother, grandmother, aunts, cousins, his growing baby sister. During his second year at Assumption he would develop an aching ardor for Ms. D’Alessandro, lithe and winsome, dark, curly hair falling around and framing an olive skinned face. At night he would lay in bed, pretending that she was his Mamá, cradling him to sleep, but it wasn’t thoughts of sleep that comforted him in those moments, it was the thought of nestling against her bosom, tightly against her body, melding himself into her, and he had no idea why the thought stirred him so, but he didn’t complain much. Of course, some girls annoyed him terribly, one to the point that he had to be restrained from punching her—not that the blow would’ve landed, as he in fact slipped on a patch of ice and almost burst himself open. Still, girls were becoming women, and women would be the enduring mystery and seduction of his life.

Marcelo splashed hot water on his face. He grabbed the can of shaving cream and depressed a dollop of it into his palm, lathering it across his skin. This was another thing about aging he didn’t like: the need to shave every day. He remembered when he could go two or three days without shaving and look no worse than having a mild five-o’clock shadow. Now, years of shaving had drawn the hair out abundantly, so that if he went one day without sliding the razor over his face he looked a potential suicide bomber. One more thing to miss from his swiftly fading youth. He heard Jessie snore lightly in the bedroom as he dragged the three-bladed razor against the grain of his beard.

He returned to Assumption at the start of 5th grade expecting the year to unfold much as the year before it had. He expected nothing momentous; or, rather, he expected everything to be momentous, because at that age the tiniest changes, the most imperceptible bends in the road were filled with meaning and portent. The accumulation of years had yet to blanch the feeling that every day was a leap into an unknown depth.

The first day of school was different from any other day: on the first day of school, the students didn’t mill around on the blocked-off street outside, waiting for the opening bell to be ordered into cohorts according to grade and class and marched inside the building. On the first day of school, the children went inside the building, filing into the auditorium where tables were set up for the various grades, 1st through 8th, where they would go to find out who their teacher would be for the year, and where their classroom was located. They would then troop upstairs in knots to their rooms, settling in their seats, rooms filled with the buzzing of voices, some high, some beginning to crack in that awkward change, waiting for the year to start.

That year, Marcelo and his gang drew Mrs. Dolan as their teacher. The bell rang over the loudspeaker, by which time Mrs. Dolan should have been at her desk. Several moments passed, filled with subdued chatter, until she finally walked in, a girl in a plaid jumper following in her wake.

“Class, we have a new student starting with us this year. Everyone say hello to Roxanne Delgado.”

Well, one could have been forgiven for mistaking Marcelo for a statue, as still as he became in his seat. Weak and perfunctory “hellos” emitted from the children, the normal diffidence towards strangers winning out over curiosity for the moment. But Marcelo, man, he was just floored. He watched Roxanne as she stood in front of the class, blinking a bit more than was normal, then watched as she walked to her desk, her ponytail bobbing up and down as she moved, her smooth legs carrying her to her seat. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her—they were glued to her form, they clung to her every motion. She had the darkest, biggest eyes he had ever seen, black yet bright, and her skin a light tan, just a bit trigeña, enough to give her an exotic air, but not enough to raise the hackles of his abuela—“If you ever bring a negra home I’ll never talk to you,” not knowing what she meant, but knowing she was serious. She sat to his right and two seats in front of him, and even from that distance he could smell the shampoo in her hair, the smell complementing the lustrous shine of it. Her neck was slender, little wisps of hair trailing from it where they wouldn’t catch in the ponytail. In front of her Lourdes turned around, telling Roxanne her name and welcoming her to the school. Mrs. Dolan rapped her desk with a pointer, trying to call the class to order. She could’ve shot off a gun and Marcelo wouldn’t have noticed. That day in early September he had entered the Time of Roxanne Delgado, a time that would last for the rest of his years in New York, and even a bit after that, a time that would bubble up, catching him unawares with the intensity of the memory, even a day after his 33rd birthday, as he cut up his face with the razor on the first day of his second third of a century.

Roxanne, despite her initial hesitancy, proved to be vivacious and outgoing. Soon, all the girls congregated around her, clinging to her every word and movement. Roxanne, however, didn’t act like a prima donna. She didn’t lord it over the other girls, or use her considerable sway for destructive purposes. She was, always, self-effacing, humble, nice. Her kindness and caring emanated from her, showing in everything she did. She never turned away anyone who needed an ear or a shoulder. She was always quick to complement a girl on a new dress, or a new pair of shoes, or a new hair-do. She was always helpful to Mrs. Dolan, and served as a class tutor for the children who couldn’t quite keep up. Everything about her—her demeanor, her attitude, her face—was perfect. Marcelo, being head of the class academically, had no need for her services. His submerged shyness kept him from offering much help to anyone besides his crewmates; he marveled at how freely Roxanne gave of herself to her classmates. Everything about her was beautiful. He thought: I must be in love. This is what it is. He never failed to say hello to her every morning, much to the quiet sniggering of Mario, Alfredo, and Jean-Michel. He would drag his buddies to sit with Roxanne and her circle during lunch, much to the derision of other boys. Sundays in church he tried to steer his family to sit in some conspicuous spot so that Roxanne and her parents would notice and maybe share the pew with them. He outdid himself in studies, and tried to match those achievements in sports, all so that she would notice him. If one were to ask him if he did these things consciously, on purpose, he would’ve snorted. Even at that age his sense of cool was well-developed. But that was of no importance. His heart cracked every time he saw her, every time he got close enough to smell her hair, every time she accidentally brushed up against him.

For Christmas, Mrs. Dolan sold the class on the idea of a Kris Kringle gift exchange, where all the children would put their names into a hat, to be drawn one by one, and whoever drew a name would have to get a present for that person. Of course, there had to be a permission slip, since any gifts would have to be bought by the parents, and some few of the parents had barely enough money for Christmas gifts for their own children, much less money to spend on some stranger, someone who might not even be a friend of their child. But, the kids saw this as a chance to get an extra Christmas gift that they wouldn’t otherwise receive, and, through persistent importuning, all of Marcelo’s classmates were allowed to participate.

The day of the drawing arrived with an air of nervous expectation. Enmities and friendships were on the line. All the children hoped that they drew friends, and that friends drew them, because the only thing worse than getting a present from someone you hated was to give that person a gift. It was a waste on a cosmic scale: you would throw away his or her gift, just as he or she would likely dispense with yours. As much as Marcelo loved his friends, though, there was only one person he hoped to draw. He didn’t much care who drew him; he got along reasonably well with everyone, even Carmen, the girl he’d wanted to punch that one day. He was at the age when being smart and cute, for some reason, got you attention. But he wanted Roxanne. There was nothing more that he wanted, that Christmas, than to get Roxanne Delgado a present. And unless he drew her name, he wouldn’t be able to do it. He could never convince his mother to buy some random girl a Christmas gift. The night before the drawing he had prayed silently, fervently, making deals with God, promising to be a better brother to Alexandra, to go to church more often, to pare down his Christmas list to Santa, anything, anything so long as his fingers grasped the slip of paper that had her name written on it. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, couldn’t really conceive it in any coherent form, but that would have been present enough for him.

“Now, remember guys, these are secret,” Mrs. Dolan intoned. “Don’t share your Kris Kringle with anyone. Keep it to yourself. That’s part of the fun.”

They wrote their names on slips of paper that Mrs. Dolan had cut out for them, folded them four times as she instructed, and threw them into a deep bowler hat that she had brought in for the occasion. She then went from desk to desk, shaking the hat every time before a little hand dipped into it, pulling out a folded piece of paper and opening it, reading the name silently to himself or herself. She reached Marcelo’s seat, and his hand shook. He bit his lip, reached his hand into the hat, his eyes shutting tight, a final prayer winging up to heaven, a last desperate plea for intervention. His fingers closed around a little bundle, hesitated, then chose another, pulling it out. He opened his eyes and looked up at Mrs. Dolan, whose face was painted with a knowing, accepting smile. She moved on up the aisle, leaving Marcelo to discover his Kris Kringle for himself. It was her. He knew it. It just had to be. He had prayed so hard. He had helped Mamá around the house, cleaning, dressing Lexie, not fighting with Carlos. He visited Abuela and Abuelo every day, spending an hour with them, albeit an hour when there weren’t any good cartoons on T.V. It all had to mean something; all his good deeds had to bear some fruit.

Jean-Michel was his Kris Kringle. As he opened the paper, and saw his name there, a wave of emotion hit him. He felt as if he could cry, and truly had to stifle down a yelp, gulping discretely for air. Jean-Michel was his best friend, but, no, no, no. It wasn’t supposed to be him. His parents bought him and Mario and Alfredo gifts anyway, just because they were such close friends. He didn’t need to be his Kris Kringle. Roxanne did. It was supposed to be her. He felt like asking Mrs. Dolan for a do-over, just pop his paper back into the hat as if he had never pulled it and try again. He timorously moved to raise his hand to make that suggestion, but, even at 10, reason overtook him. It was too late. Jean-Michel would get two gifts from him this year, and his Christmas was ruined.

He looked straight ahead of him, the buzzing of children’s voices whizzing about him, when he noticed that Roxanne was staring at him. And after he had obviously caught her staring, she didn’t break her gaze, just looked at him intensely, her dark eyes boring into him. His breathing increased as he was trapped in her stare, he felt his heart begin to pound, he swallowed nervously. Then she smiled at him, and turned back around, talking with the girl in front of her.

What was that about? Why had she looked at him like that? She had never looked at him like that, never looked at him in a manner any different than with which she looked at anyone else. She was very catholic in her bestowal of glances. This was something different. Maybe she had been hoping that he would pick her. And maybe she assumed that he had picked her, and stared at him so hard to let him know that she knew. But he hadn’t chosen her! Now he was truly miserable. The best girl in the class thought he was getting her a gift, and it would be from someone else. He comforted himself with the fact that she would never know. This was secret, after all. There was some relief in anonymity.

The day before Christmas break arrived, and the students of Mrs. Dolan’s 5th grade class trooped into the room, gift boxes carried in arms or heaved around in bags. It was a free dress day, so everyone wore jeans and pullovers and slacks underneath their heavy coats. It was also a short day, when not much work would get done. The entire day revolved around the gift exchange and the little party they were having, sodas and cookies and cake all laid out on Mrs. Dolan’s desk. Two hours, just enough for eating and tearing open presents, and they’d all be home in time for Gilligan’s Island.

Remarkably, the secrets were kept. The children didn’t share with one another for whom their presents were, hiding the names even from their closest friends. Once they entered the class, they piled the boxes willy-nilly in the corner, trying not to notice the color or the pattern of the wrapping paper of everyone else’s boxes. Kris Kringle activated some sort of altruistic impulse in them, giving a gift simply for the giving of it, not expecting anything in return from that person. Of course, they expected something, so perhaps the lesson wasn’t quite complete. But, it was close enough.

As always, the day began with a student leading the school in a prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance over the loudspeaker, then with the day’s announcements from Sister Roberta, the principal. Usually that would be followed by an hour of English, but, this being a short day, that was dispensed with. The kids swarmed up to Mrs. Dolan’s desk, all with cards for her, some with little presents. She gratefully stacked the gifts behind the desk, and opened all the cards one by one, reading them, laying a hand on each child’s cheek or shoulder and thanking them for the thought. They filled cups with drinks, and Mrs. Dolan cut out slices of cake for them, which they piled on paper plates along with cookies, and they all sat down in knots of friends. Next door was the other 5th grade class, which was having its own party, and the connecting door between the two rooms was open, with children wandering from class to class, checking out what goodies were to be had. This amiable chaos reigned for an hour until Mrs. Dolan called the class to order, announcing it was time to hand out the presents. She started grabbing packages and calling out names, one by one, children rushing up to the front of the room to snag their gifts. No one was allowed to open their gift until they had all been distributed; once she handed out the last one, there commenced a frenzied ripping of paper and opening of boxes as the children dug into their bounties.

Marcelo carefully undid the wrapping paper and opened his gift. It was a plain, brown box, like the kind they had at the post office for sending packages. Tape secured the flaps. He grabbed a pen and cut open the tape, opening the box. Inside he saw the first three books of the Chronicles of Narnia, and a note. He opened the note, and it read, in clear, girlish script: I wanted to save something to give you for your birthday. Merry Christmas. There was no signature. But the fact of the note itself flushed his cheeks. He looked around the room, trying to discern who his Kris Kringle was. His eyes roved from girl to girl—it had to be a girl, all the boys in the class, save him, had atrocious penmanship—trying to catch an eye, trying to elicit a silent admission. Some avoided his glance, some returned it and giggled, but he found no definitive proof. Then his eyes alit on Roxanne. She was turned sideways to him, not quite holding him in her field of vision, but somehow, peripherally, she noticed him looking. She turned around, catching him, and again held his look, the way she had the day they picked their Kris Kringles. She held his eyes for maybe a moment, though to him it seemed as if he aged a lifetime in her stare. Then she smiled, widely, showing off her white teeth, and nodded slightly, barely perceptibly, but enough, more than enough for him.

“Roxanne Delgado.” Marcelo splashed steaming water onto his face, stanching the little cuts on his face by patting them down with a towel. “The first girl ever to give me a present.”

From the bedroom, Jessie stirred, “Wha?”

“Nada. Just talking to myself. You know how old folks get. Go back to sleep—it’s still early.”

Sleepily, “Why aren’t you in bed?”

“Hey, I’m 33. I can’t waste any time. I’m going out for a quick jog before we go to breakfast. Be back in an hour.”

Jessie murmured an assent as she burrowed back into the comforter, reaching over and gathering Marcelo’s pillows into her arms, embracing them in substitution for him. Marcelo threw on some clothes and running shoes, grabbed his keys, and headed out into the morning. The sky was overcast, fog floated along the surface of the earth, cars materializing spectrally out of the moisture, headlights flashing in what seemed like a lopsided struggle against the enveloping, wet blanket. He inhaled a deep breath, stretched his legs for a few minutes, jogged in place, prepared himself for his run. He loved mornings like this. Winter wasn’t far away—already the days were getting crisper. He looked around him, trying to decide whether to stay in the residential streets, or venture out onto Beverly. This morning he wanted quiet. The fog and the quiet lanes where people lived suited him.

The years passed, and he continued his dance with Roxanne. He did get the rest of the Chronicles for his birthday. And she received a gift in return when she invited him to her birthday party. At school they circled around each other, drawing closer, joining together to do class projects, spending lunches with each other. Their friends, in that cusp between childhood and adolescence, made kissing noises at them whenever they were together. They had never kissed, though. They had never even held hands. Theirs was a platonic love, a love of the idea of who the other was, more than the reality. It seemed to be the truest kind of love, and also the safest. Roxanne grew more beautiful with every passing month, and just the fact of being in her orbit brought him pleasure.

One day, in the weeks just before the start of 8th grade, they met at J. Hood Wright Park, a haunt of the kids in the neighborhood. It was a big, rolling, green space, taking up six square city blocks, interspersed with benches, trees that seemed old enough to have been there since the arrival of the Dutch, basketball and handball courts. Families camped on the green swards, kids threw footballs, a Little League game was taking place on the baseball field. They weren’t quite alone, of course; they moved in gangs, and their friends had spread out through the park, some in knots, some in couples, some off playing basketball or handball. But Marcelo and Roxanne sat on a bench, under the shade of a tree, the sky above a seemingly impossible blue. They sat next to each other, but a barrier of air and expectation separated them, not allowing them to touch.

“Marc?”

“Yeah?”

“How come you’ve never asked me to be your girlfriend?”

Marcelo whipped his head to face her, nonplussed at the question.

“Well, um, I don’t know. I guess I’ve never thought of it.”

“I mean, don’t you like me?”

“Yeah, well, sure, I guess so.”

Roxanne smacked her lips. “Ay, that’s not an answer.”

His voice cracked. “Yeah, yeah, I like you.”

“Good. Because I like you too.” She lowered her eyes, suddenly looking very much like a 13-year-old girl. She raised her head again, a smile playing on her lips, and leaned into Marcelo, her eyes closed, her mouth pursed. Marcelo had opportunity to kiss other girls—he was quite the popular young boy—but had never taken advantage of them, always finding some kind way to put them off, so much so that even his friends were starting to talk, wondering what was wrong, for what was he waiting. Now he knew why, or rather rediscovered the reason, exploding freshly in his mind. Finally, he leaned in, eyes open to little slits so he could hold her face in his vision, mouth open just slightly as he’d seen on T.V. so many times. Their lips met, hers soft and delicious, his with a fine film of fuzz that he called a moustache, and they kissed, then pulled apart, then kissed again, longer this time, his hand finding the side of her face, holding it, caressing her cheek as they leaned into each other, supporting each other with their mouths, as if they would fall off of the bench if they broke the kiss. Blood rushed to his head, his ears thudded with the sound of the rush, blocking out the park’s other noises. They kept kissing, reveling in their new discovery, her fingers lacing through his hair, his hand cupping her face, neither sure of what they were doing, but guided by something instinctual, genetic.

“Look! They’re making out!” Mario squealed in a way only a 13-year-old boy can squeal, unabashedly and at the same time with a consciousness, dim and forming, that such an utterance was no longer appropriate for one of his age and gender. His squeeze Letty shrieked along with him, breaking out into a round of “Marcelo and Roxanne sitting in a tree.” Slowly their friends filtered in from around the nooks and crannies of the park, and other park goers turned around to cursorily glance at the new, young lovers, smiling briefly in acknowledgement, or turning away in indifference. Roxanne and Marcelo broke off their kiss, giggling at each other. Marcelo took her hand and lifted her up off of the bench as their courtiers reconstituted themselves around them.

“He said he liked me,” Roxanne said.

“About time! Dang, what took him so long?”

“Yeah homey, ‘bout time you made a move.”

Approbation swirled around him. He was already heady from the taste and feel of Roxanne’s lips. Now he was further intoxicated by the feeling that he had passed through some barrier, a wall that separated his earlier, childish self from a new, more adult, more mature iteration. He clutched Roxanne’s hand, his own hand clammy, drawing close enough to her so that he could smell the perfume of her hair. The world swam around him as the group left the park and slowly made its way home, knowing parents would be expecting them soon for dinner. He had done it. He had finally kissed Roxanne, fulfilled the heart of his desire. Everything felt right, Roxanne’s fingers laced in his own, almost inextricably, their friends around them, the warm fall sun slowly descending over the Hudson.

Marcelo panted as he jogged, his breath coming out in white puffs in the thick fog. The sound of his feet hitting the pavement thumped in his ears, keeping synchronous rhythm with his heartbeat. He maintained more of a running pace than a jog, driving himself, wanting to exhaust himself with exercise. He was 33, after all. Health was important. And the faster he ran, the more his mind emptied, the more the great effort of putting one foot in front of the other, of lifting his heavy, aching arms crowded out all other thought. He had a vague hope that enlightenment would descend upon him in those types of moments, catching him at unawares, deluging him in ripples of recognition. Enlightenment of what, he wasn’t sure. Perhaps the perfect first line for his much bruited, much put-off novel. He tried out phrases and sentences on himself as he ran, hoping that with his conscious mind occupied with the management of the running his subconscious would have free rein with the words, would churn and boil and present him with some perfectly shaped gem. But today, like most days, the words didn’t come. All that came were those images of Roxanne, the ones of which he had dreamt and with which he awoke. He snorted in disgust at himself: it was silly and self-indulgent to wallow in a long-ago love affair, one that ended before it even had a chance to be consummated. At least if they’d fucked, well, that would’ve been something, wouldn’t it? But he never remembered Adriana as fondly as he remembered Roxanne. He didn’t dream about the feel of her thighs wrapped around him the way he dreamt of Roxanne’s fleeting kisses. Why were those memories so insistent?

For six months, Roxanne and Marcelo lived in a state of bliss. They spent every spare moment they could alone. On weekends he would take her exploring the city, walking all over the Village, Tribeca, Little Italy, Chinatown. They would bound up into the Main Branch of the public library, the stained, granite lions standing sentinel on the steps, almost wearily noticing yet another couple of hormonal children stealing up the stairs to do god knows what among the stacks. Of course, what they mostly did was paw each other in some secluded, musty section, hands all over each other, tongue flailing at tongue as if in some test of strength, breaths and bodies overheated. Her parents liked him well enough, as much as any Latin parent liked any boy who was enamored of their teenage daughter. Papá and Mamá thought Roxanne was darling, and were even more surprised that she was Dominican, being so light-skinned. His parents’ approval, for once, confirmed his choice. He was as deliriously happy as a 13-year-old boy could be.

Around Valentine’s Day, Roxanne began to withdraw from Marcelo. They didn’t stop hanging out, but even he could tell something had changed. She didn’t want to spend every moment with her lips on his, and she pulled away when he touched her at times. To his questioning she denied anything was amiss, and, he not knowing how to pry information from her unwillingly, not knowing how to deal with the changeable moods of a loved one who wasn’t family, let her be, and pretended that things were, more or less, the same. As long as she didn’t tell him that they were through, he was happy.

Valentine’s Day rolled around, a Monday, and Marcelo had spent the weekend making a basket for Roxanne, full of all sorts of chocolates, the products of months of saving allowance money. The gift came with a card that contained his most flowery writing, declaring eternal and undying love to her. It was everything he expected a Valentine’s Day to be, passionate, romantic, intimately attached. He was more than dimly aware of the things boys and girls could do with each other; such knowledge is hard to avoid growing up in Washington Heights, and doubly hard when you had cable in your room and access to Channel J and its late-night parade of sex shows. Oh, he was quite well versed, theoretically, in what he and Roxanne could do. But he didn’t want to do it with her, at least not in so tawdry a fashion. He wanted it to be a mutual decision, something suggested almost from the outside, an epiphany that it was the right moment to make love. Until then: chocolates, cards, kissing, the odd fondle, and patience.

He arrived at Assumption, the basket concealed in a large Gimbel’s shopping bag, looking for Roxanne. He ran first into Jean-Michel.

“Hey man, there’s something wrong with your lady.”

“Wha? Whatcha mean there’s something wrong with her?”

“She’s over there on the steps, cryin’. All the girls’re around her.”

His flesh rippled coldly at the news. He wound his way through the street/schoolyard, working his way through clumps of children to make it to the school’s front steps. And, sure enough, there she was, a gaggle of girls surrounding her, soft hands on her shoulders and knees, patting her, comforting her.

“He-hey, what’s up?”

The girls pulled away from Roxanne, one by one, like balletic, cartoon swans. They looked at him, mouths drawn tightly, shaking their heads, whether in sympathy or derision he couldn’t tell. He climbed a couple of steps, sitting next to her. She leaned her head and rested it on his shoulder.

“Is there something wrong?”

She sighed. She wrapped her arms around his waist.

“Oh Marc. Everything’s fucked.”

Marcelo looked down at her. Roxanne was not one to use profanity very often. He surmised that he could recount precisely every time that she had cursed in front of him.

“What’s fucked?”

She lifted her head from his shoulder. Her eyes were red and puffy, as if she’d been crying for weeks.

“I’m moving.”

Marcelo opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. “Oh” was all he could manage to get out.

“That’s not such a bad thing, is it?”

“It is. I’m moving to Long Island.”

Again, “Oh.” Marcelo, unlike most of his classmates, had an excellent grasp of world geography. However, like most New Yorkers, he had a very fuzzy concept of what lay immediately beyond the environs of the five boroughs. He did know that Long Island was bad. Long Island wasn’t close. Long Island didn’t even have subways—people out there had cars, and not like his Uncle Theo, who had bought a car for his son Ricky, who never drove it, and was only driven to be parked on alternate sides of the street for street sweeping days. They drove everywhere, like they did out in L.A., not needing to wait for trains or buses or taxis. She may as well have told him she was moving to L.A. It was equally disastrous for him.

“Wh-when are you leaving?”

“In a month. My papi found a house out there. He’s still coming into the city to work, but he wants to get us out of here.”

“What’s so bad about here?”

“It’s the ghetto, he says. He says, ‘I didn’t come all the way here so that my family could live worse that we would’ve in Santo Domingo.’”

“But, Long Island? That’s so far away. My mom doesn’t let me go to Queens.”

She sighed. “I know.”

“How long have you known?”

“Couple of weeks.” She sniffled. “I felt dead when they told me. I didn’t know what to tell you. I didn’t want to see the look on your face that you have now.”

Marcelo cast down his eyes onto the steps, breaking away from Roxanne’s glance. He sucked in a deep breath.

“We can call each other. Every night.”

“Yeah,” she said. “We can. And we’ll still come into the city. We still have family here.” Both spoke in dull monotones, stringing words together just to occupy the silence.

Marcelo handed her the bag. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

She smiled suddenly, clapping her hands. “Oh wow, so much chocolate.”

Marcelo grinned goofily, for the barest of moments forgetting the news he’d just been told. Then it occurred to him that this would be the last Valentine’s Day he’d ever spend with her. Their first and last. He felt the tears well up. He was always quick to cry, a fact that he had managed to hide successfully from everyone at school. Only through a supreme act of self control was he able to squelch the incipient sobs, smiling and kissing Roxanne back as she thanked him for the gift.

“I haven’t gotten you anything yet,” she said. “I’ve been so sad that I just haven’t been able to go out and do anything. The only time I’m happy is when you’re around me, and then when you’re gone, well…”

“S’ok. I’m a guy. Today’s for girls.”

She smirked. “That’s such a boy thing to say.”

Sister Roberta appeared on the front steps of the west side entrance, wig firmly in place, large overcoat covering her sensible business suit. She rang the big brass bell, the peals resounding off the stone and brick facades of the school and the surrounding tenements, calling the students to order. Roxanne and Marcelo arose, walking to join their classmates. She took his fingertips in her hand, swinging their arms delicately. He felt the same thrill he always felt when she touched him, mixed now with a cavernous sadness. He now felt time slipping by inexorably, at a relentless rate, as if time was water and he was the little Dutch boy trying to plug breaks in the dyke with his fingers. He would cry later. For now, he held her hand, warm in his.

A car horn’s blare brought Marcelo up short. He was running across a street, and the car rolled past the stop sign, not seeing him in the fog.

“Shove it up your ass, pendejo!” Marcelo yelled, turning his head to face the quickly enveloped car.

“Fuck you!”

Marcelo flipped the hidden driver the finger as he continued his pace, sparing just that briefest of motions for him.

He breathed hard, his chest rising and falling with the effort, his veins aching. He wasn’t sure how far he’d been running. L.A. wasn’t like Manhattan: there you knew that twenty blocks roughly equaled one mile. In L.A., a block could stretch for a quarter of a mile or more, some gargantuan mall fronting it. He was past Fairfax, and running hard towards La Cienega. He would probably turn around there, head south back to Beverly, make his way east to Poinsettia and then home to shower, and hell, maybe collapse into bed. He doubted Jessie would be up yet. She surely did love her late mornings in. He’d probably have to wake her up and get her bathed so they could start on celebrating his birthday.

In short order, Roxanne’s moving day arrived. And just like that she was gone. Sure, they spent every moment they could together before the move. They came close to fucking, even. They didn’t, though, pulling back at the last moment, afraid of what they would open, without any practical opportunity of remedying it. Roxanne, apart from a few tears, seemed to be handling it relatively well. He, however, was seized by a mania. All he could see was her looming departure, and how that would initiate a gaping rupture in his life. She would go to a new school; she’d make new friends; she’d find someone else to love. He wasn’t completely innocent of how things worked. He knew people forgot. He barely remembered Rosemary, or any of his friends from his first school. And he had a feeling, now, that if he Mario and Alfredo and Jean-Michel drifted apart, he would forget them too, almost painlessly. (Of course, he did.) Roxanne would forget him. But what scared him, what kept him awake nights, was the strong suspicion that he would never forget her. In some fashion, in some manner, she would always remain lodged in his mind. She would come up unbidden, washing over him, swamping him with memory as his first love, if not his first lover. She would get on with her life, and he would remain with a spot shaped like her face. He wasn’t sure why he thought this, why she would be able to move on from him and he wouldn’t from her. But it was a conviction. She would be a specter.

And as he ran home, as he wended his way back to Jessie, there she was. He breathed her in as he ran, every feeling recalled raw and tellingly. Why now, though? He hadn’t thought of her for years. And it was a bit silly to go moonfaced over some childhood fling. But that was unfair; he discovered love with her. That was something. And, despite all the women he’d been with since her, he wasn’t sure that he’d ever recaptured that raw sense of devotion that he had with Roxanne. Not with Elizabeth. Not with Jessie. Perhaps it was unfair to keep comparing every relationship to a long-dead, idealized love affair. But he couldn’t help it. Everyone, in large part, is merely a collection of experiences rolled up into a mass of sinuous and contradictory lessons, he thought. Some experiences toll far more acutely than others. He had spent a lifetime trying to find a replacement for Roxanne, and had failed, unsurprisingly. That didn’t mean she wasn’t out there, though. The thing of it was, though, that Jessie thought she was the one. Although he had never done anything to give her that notion—(except move in with her!)—neither had he done anything to set her straight. As he neared home, as he started on the first day of his second third of a century, he felt a resolve build in him. He would break with her. It wasn’t working out. He wasn’t “feeling her,” as the common patois had it. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t her—it was him.

Oh, who was he kidding? It was her. It was all her. If he wanted intelligent, informed conversation, he had to turn elsewhere. If he wanted to go to a museum or a gallery, he had to corral friends to accompany him, or go alone. Movies were a constant negotiation—art house stuff, anything with subtitles, right out. She was a sweet girl and all, and he knew she loved him, and he loved her, in a fashion. But really, there had to be more besides companionship, beyond the dull, stultifying satisfaction of monotone monogamy. There had to be something else out there. And there was, wasn’t there? That hadn’t been just a cursory hug last night, had it? Had Jessie noticed? Probably not. The fingers kneading his back, lingering longer than friendship demanded. And that perfume: hadn’t he told her once before that he loved the smell of it on her, that if she wasn’t his sister’s best friend and taken it might make him do things? She wasn’t taken now, was she? No, no. Of course, he was. There was always something to muck up the works.

He pushed himself, running the last hundred yards or so all-out, his lungs painfully wheezing in and out, the report of his feet hitting the pavement ricocheting dully in the evaporating fog. He stumbled to his front door, bending over double on the front step, exhausted. He craned his head upwards, barely able to focus on the number on the door. Suddenly, he heard it open, and there stood Jessie, still dressed in her sleepwear, a cup of coffee in her hand.

“Hey you.”

Wheeze. “Hey.”

“Didja have a good run?”

“Oh, yeah, it was okay. Almost got run over. A stray dog ran with me for a couple of blocks. Just the ordinary ordinariness.”

She laughed. “That’s why you can never get me to run. These streets aren’t safe.”

“You wouldn’t run if we lived in a retirement village.”

“True enough, I suppose.” She looked at him curiously. “Are you just going to stand there bent over, or are you coming into the house?”

He let out a long sigh and straightened himself up.

“Yeah, yeah, I suppose I should go into my house.”

Jessie stepped aside. He walked painfully past the threshold, and shut the door behind him.