Excerpts
From “The Twin,” The Temple of Air
…
When Henry and Robert first arrived in New Hope those years ago, they stayed at the High Hope Motor Court located on the wooded slope of one of the hills at the edge of town. They’d paid for two weeks in advance, in cash, and Robert had signed them in under their real names, but scribbled their signatures so they were essentially illegible—a messiness he prided himself on because he thought it made his name look more important. At the trading firm he’d signed hundreds of checks and thousands of statements, sweeping the pen over the documents with a flourish and a sigh, fully aware that hundreds of thousands of dollars were accounted for or released under indecipherable squiggles and lines made by his own hand.
“What’s that say?” The old lady at the desk lifted up her bifocals and leaned closer to the register. Henry could see her scalp where her dyed black hair parted, and the whispery lines of gray on either side of the pink line of flesh. Would they have to dye their own hair, Henry wondered. Clearly they had to become someone other than who they were now. New names, new jobs. New hair? New clothes? Maybe he’d go blond if Robert chose black; he’d take to wearing blue jeans and gym shoes.
The incredible possibility of becoming another person—not just Henry of Robert and Henry, not just one of “the twins” like everyone called them at work, at school, at their apartment in the city, like their parents had called them up until the day Mr. and Mrs. Saltzman loaded their moving van and left the cold winter suburbs for the sunshine of Florida and had skidded off the road in a freak ice storm in Tennessee, leaving behind a tangle of overdrafts and unpaid bills and two grown-up sons to take care of it all—the opportunity to start again as someone other than whom he had been all of his life was exhilarating to Henry. And terrifying. In equal doses. The enormity of it left him without words standing in the tiny office cabin at High Hope Motor Court, fascinated now by the wiry black hairs at the edges of the old woman’s upper lip. She looked from one twin to the other and back, blinking as though clearing sleep from her eyes.
“Hubert,” Robert said. “Call me Bert.”
And Henry was amazed (even after all these years) at how quickly Robert had figured things out, developed a strategy, responded to a problem with a solution. Robert smiled broadly at the woman, all orthodontist-straightened teeth and pink lips and soft eyes. He was the handsome one.
She smiled back, the hairs twitching at the corners of her mouth.
“And this one?” She pointed to the other name. “I can’t make it out at all.”
“Ernie,” Robert said. “Like those puppets on television, only we were Bert and Ernie first. Seagram. Like the whiskey.”
Henry tried the new name out in his head, Ernie, Ernie, Ernie, and Seagram, Seagram, Seagram, and it was okay, close enough.
“That Jewish?” The old lady asked. Her eyes swept over Robert’s close-cut auburn curls and landed on Henry’s nose, which had a bump made by Robert’s elbow, an accident during a foot race when they were kids.
“English,” Robert said, still smiling, always smiling, but Henry saw the tightening of muscle in his temple. “Our grandfather was Jewish,” Robert said, the story growing so easily that Henry thought for a moment that there might be some truth to it. “We’re not religious, though.” And they weren’t really, although they’d celebrated their bar mitzvah together, like they did everything together, with family and a guest list of nearly one hundred people.
The woman made a noise in her throat, a grunt it sounded like, but then she handed Robert two key rings made from wooden triangles glued together to look like pine trees. And in another few minutes the twins were in their own mold-smelling cabin, one of a half-dozen of them painted Indian red and scattered over the hillside. Wasps buzzed outside the screen door, hovering around a nest in the corner of the awning that was the color of a Dreamsicle. Robert then Henry showered and they unpacked and sat down at the small Formica table near the window (blinds drawn, warm Frescas and bags of crispy cheese puffs in front of them) and began to make a plan.
…
“Deer Story,” The Temple of Air
And when you see it there on the side of the road (above it, really) it’s already too late. You know. “Don’t,” you say. Out loud maybe. But it doesn’t matter what you want (or don’t) it’s too late already, and it’s hitting the ground on all fours then up again and into the lights, into the way but in the air still, bounding, and for a second you hope—maybe believe—it will clear. It will beat you, you hope, over that spot in the road, or rise high enough so you might pass underneath. But no. Of course not. You clip it as it springs up, feel the impact of all four ankles at once hit the front of the car, watch—foot hard on the brake where it’s been since this started—as it lifts and tumbles, sideways up and over, an antler taking a stab at the top of the windshield, a road map of cracks spreading out and down the shatterproof glass. And it’s behind you now. It fills the mirror, big and brown and coming down like something stuffed and heavy. You squeeze your eyes closed to absorb its landing, and when you look again it’s gone. And that’s when you swerve—too late, but it couldn’t have mattered any earlier. (You find out from the handsome neighbor with the scarred wife that it’s a path they all follow in rut like they are, third killed in a week in a quarter mile. Killed by the rut.) But still, you swerve, and ahead, the man you thought you loved but know that you will leave—in his own car driving home in tandem from a bar in the city—sees your lights weave out of his rearview then in again and then out as you pull to the side of the road and sit there, shaking. And his taillights flash white and he’s backed his way to you, jumps out of his car and in shirt sleeves, with his hands jammed down his pockets, he bobs foot to foot outside your window. “What,” he says and his breath is white shadow against black sky. He doesn’t know. And you’re mad that he hasn’t noticed; it’s just another thing he’s missed. “A deer,” you say when you open the window finally. “Stay there,” he says then (for the first time. But not the last.) And you do this time while he runs around in the cold in the weeds, to his car and back, in the weeds again. For the smallest moment you think maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t hurt, just tripped more or less over the hood of the car. But then the man you know you will leave comes back, his eyes bright in the dark and his hands trembling, holding—of all things—an X-acto knife. “This won’t do,” he says, “it’s not enough.” And you know exactly what he means. Then he tells you to go on home, get the neighbor to bring a gun. (The neighbor’s a hunter you’d found out over burgers on the grill. They both—he and she—used to be. But his wife—nice woman, too bad about her face, one whole side scooped out from eye to chin—won’t even eat meat now and hardly leaves the house.) So you do what you’re told, drive on the last three miles alone, the windshield a kaleidoscope of darkness. You’re crying now and it’s hard to see, thank God it’s a straight shot of highway. And in the nice little subdivision, suburbs in the country, split-levels and townhomes where the man you are leaving built you a brand new house (like maybe that’d be enough), you pull into your drive and run to the neighbors’ and when you pound, he’s there in a flash. And you notice again how handsome he is. You remember how his back felt when you rubbed against him, his whole self a warm wall between you and the cold air of the open refrigerator, his hands choking the necks of the beers, and you reached around him for yours, flattened your breasts to him, wanted him. And the man you are leaving was out there, with the burgers and the wife, but you were inside with the neighbor who turned around and smiled so small it looked like it hurt. Then he circled one icy hand under your shirt and let it get warm on the low curve of your back. And outside there was small talk and quiet, and inside there was nothing but this. But tonight his wife’s there, too, in shadow behind him. It’s always dark in their house, you can’t help but notice. And they listen while you tell and he’s half out the door when you remember this: “Got a gun?” You say and he stops dead, one hand on the doorknob, his face draining, white. And his wife steps back and turns away. But it’s just a quick moment, a small shift, before he says “I got something.” And he spins off in his truck and you make your way across the lawns to your house and inside and crawl into bed, clothes and all; and under the warmth of the blankets you shake and you pray. You don’t even know if you believe in God, but shouldn’t you apologize to someone? You didn’t mean to do it, but you did it, and you asked to be forgiven, it wasn’t your fault, but you were was sorry, so sorry, so very, very sorry. And when your head was packed tight from the praying and the crying, you rolled onto your back—still, finally—and stared at the ceiling. You waited in the wide bed you shared with the man you are leaving, watched for the white columns of his headlights to come through the window. And then out of a dream starting, you hear voices, and the neighbor says somewhere outside the window “accident” and “shotgun” and “face” and “fault.” And you put it together in the dark, about the neighbor’s wife. The part that seemed missing. And you get it now, you’ve figured it all out. He did it. He’d shot half her face off (an accident, what else could it be?) yet still there they were. Together. And you hear the man you used to think you loved outside the window, too. “Oh my” and “Christ man, I’m really sorry,” and his voice sounds different than you’re used to, sounds soft and thick. But then they’re laughing, the two of them, and the neighbor says, “We’d better gut this sucker,” and you hear “Yeah, baby, fresh meat!” And whatever you’d started to think in that moment when his voice went soft, about changing your mind, about staying maybe, was gone. You hugged the blankets over your heart and turned your back to the window and knew in that way you knew when you’d hit the deer (there just isn’t any other end to this story) it was already too late.
…
ALICE IN CUBA LAND
(an excerpt, a version of which was previously published in FMagazine)
CHAPTER ONE
The four of us pressed together in the back of the cab. Shirley was practically in Misha’s lap, and his hand slid under her red silk dress and up the length of her leg. She looked almost young in the light of his lust; her sixty-year-old face flushed and pink, her neck stretched long and lineless, the loose bits of her hair shining blond on her shoulders. Misha, all lines, angles and tumbling black mane whispered in her ear. And Alberto—big, beautiful Alberto, an expanse of man with an open, kind face and soft eyes—leaned toward me. I could only imagine what he saw: Alice Copeland, distinctly American with my toothpaste smile and sun-reddened skin and freckles and my badly chopped pixie cut. Nothing special, really—less exotic than the Cuban women he must know. And older, certainly. Alberto put his arm across my shoulders.
“Permiso,” he said, “more room.”
How can I explain how the night had gone so far? It was one of those evenings that should have been a terrible, terrible bust, but somehow wasn’t. Maybe it was the rum. Probably it was the rum. The blind date was Shirley’s idea, a setup that I should have seen coming but didn’t. She insisted we go out for the evening, said I needed to try drinking somewhere other than the hotel’s patio bar where we’d met on my first night in town, where we shared a bottle of rum and easy conversation like similar outsiders in a strange place can.
“You’ve been in Havana for weeks,” she’d said when she called earlier in the afternoon, “and you haven’t been anywhere.” But I had. I’d walked the streets of the neighborhoods, past the crumbling mansions of Vedado, through the tight grid of Centro Havana, in and out of the over-priced tobacco and knickknack shops of Havana Vieja. Weeks had passed since I’d left my apartment in Chicago, my job on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and Bruce, my lover. Weeks since I’d left the bedside of my mother where I’d sat while she died. Time passed as I’d run miles on the Malecón and listened to the water hit the rocks beyond the seawall, read the yellowed newspaper clippings in the Museo de la Revolucion, toured the dusty exhibits in the Museo Nacional de Musica. I’d climbed the wide, tall steps of the Universidad de Havana and I’d had lunch under the arch in tinyChinatown. I’d navigated my way through the crowds gathered in front of the US Interests Section over the last couple of days, yelling for the return of that little boy, the one who’d been found in the sea.
“That’s not out,” Shirley said. I could hear the steady drag on her cigarette over the phone line. She exhaled. “I mean out out. Dress up out. Going out. Girls’ night out.” And I, for some reason, agreed. And agreed, too, to making a real night of it, getting dressed up for once, putting on a bit of makeup. The dress was hers, and even though I’m a good bit taller and heavier than she is, Shirley’s fitted black linen sheath looked not bad on me. We had a ball getting ready together, like roommates in the small, high rise apartment she’d lived in for the fifteen years since she’d left Ohio and come to work as a translator and to be warm and drink rum and fall in love, over and over again with young, beautiful, Cuban men. We primped and danced to the salsa on her turntable, tried on shoes and earrings and drank warm beer out of her temperamental refrigerator. By the time we left her place, two girls on the town dressed in red, dressed in black, we were more than a little tipsy.
And then there were the guys. Out at a cabaret at the Teatro Nacional, a weirdly political and melodramatic stage show (fog machines, Che berets, blue lights) in a cavernous room in what looked like an office building that overlooked the Plaza de la Revolucion, these two men approached us, and it took me more than a few minutes to understand that Shirley not only knew them, but had invited them, and that the tall, angular one with a ponytail was the latest in her series of boyfriends (emphasis on boy here, a dozen years younger than me, so decades between him and Shirley.) And his buddy, a bulky, dark man with a ponytail too, was, as Shirley whispered in my ear, “for” me.
“Misha, Alberto, esta es mi amiga, Alícia,” Shirley said, all smiles and narrowed, glinting eyes.
We made room for them in the booth because what else could we do? I dragged my attention away from the sight of Misha (“It’s Mikhail, actually; my parents wanted me to be Russian”) at Shirley’s neck, nuzzling the pale, bluish loose skin there, and turned to my glass and to what I could hear Alberto saying to me over the buzz of huge, blown speakers. Shirley had told him that I was a teacher—one of the lies I’d been anchoring myself with since I’d left home, the one that kept me from admitting I was here because I was just jobless and adrift. Alberto was a teacher, too, he said. His English was good and he spoke it fast, like he’d had a lot of practice. He said he loved working with kids, and wasn’t it great that I was fromChicago—he’d always wanted to go there. Carl Sandburg was from there he said, as though I might not know. I was, after all, a literature major in college; not the best preparation for my work in the markets. Not the best preparation for anything, really. Still, I was surprised that a broad shouldered young Cuban man would know about the poetry of Carl Sandburg. Every man I’d met here so far said something like, “Ah,Chicago. Al Capone,” or “Ah,Chicago—Michael Jordan,” when they found out where I was from. And they’d make that machine gun gesture or pretend they were shooting a basketball, depending. But with Alberto it was, “Chicago. ‘Hog Butcher for the World, City of Big Shoulders.’ Carl Sandburg.”
And Alberto wanted to talk, I could tell, because he leaned in close and spoke in my ear and I felt his breath on my shoulder and he asked a lot of questions. Some I could answer easily without having to come up with more lies to track and to juggle, others I pretended not to hear or understand.
“How long are you here, Alícia?” (Alícia is what I went by ever since a drunk man in a dive bar on a beach in Mexico called me that after making fun of the name I’d given him: “Alice. Alice in Wonderland; Alice doesn’t live here anymore; bang, zoom, to the moon, Alice,” and then changed it to this other one, this prettier one, this one that sounded rounder, sounded sexier. “Alícia,” he’d called me, and then he told me how to get toCuba.)
Alberto: “What do you like to teach?” (Excuse me?)
“What have you seen so far?” (Many things.)
“What do you read with your students?” (Pardon?)
“How long have you been teaching?” (¿Qué?)
And “Do you like it here?” The question that everyone asked me, but when Alberto did he dipped his head low and looked in my eyes, his own dark, dark brown ones warm and inviting, and he titled close to me so he could hear my answer and I was good and drunk by then, swallowing mouthfuls of rum whenever I wanted to fill the empty space in our conversation, so I leaned toward him and wanted to answer for real, not just make small talk. I wanted to say, Yes, yes I did; I liked it very much here. I liked—no, loved—the hot air and stinging sun; I loved the storms that were starting to come in over the island, their winds and their drama. I loved being alone, away from the needs and complications of others; I loved walking around, visiting every museum, wandering every neighborhood. Still, I wanted more than just that, too—how could I tell Alberto this? I felt like I had a crush on Havana, was seduced by its charms, its romance, its music, but I wanted our relationship (mine and the city’s, mine and the island’s) to evolve. I was tired of being the perpetual tourist, of trying to look into every doorway and around each corner, tired of the slack-jawed wonder I felt as I swiveled my head from side to side (look at that, look at that, look at that—Alice in Cuba Land.) It was great, this overwhelming infatuation I’d been feeling for weeks now, but frankly, I wanted to tell Alberto, it wasn’t nearly enough. But when I shifted toward him, ready to say all that I had to say, to get him to hear me over the loud, loud noise of the ridiculous lounge acts, and to understand me through the jumble of words and thoughts I was ready to spill, I felt the booze lapping at my brain and I had to lean back in my seat to steady myself, had to hold onto the table for balance. I had to hold on or—I was certain, in that way drunks are always certain—I might float away.
“Come, darlings,” Shirley said then from far away across the table, and Misha was already standing and holding her elbow and she was sliding across the bench toward him. There was a break in the show—the immensely political and very crummy show—so Alberto took my hand and we all made a dash for the door and waved down a passing car, not a real cab, but a temporary cab, a guy willing to make a couple of bucks by giving us a ride, and we went to a rooftop that overlooked Havana and where—it’s said—Hemingway used to drink, and we drank some more there, daiquiris this time, like Hemingway drank, and we danced, too, which was made easier for me by the drink, and then we left that place, (“Nothing but tourists,” Misha said, and then he looked at me and said, “sorry,” and I waved him off,) and we crammed into another gypsy cab that careened around the curve of the Malecón back toward Vedado where Misha said he knew just the spot, all Cubans, and he looked at me again and said, “sorry,” and then we all laughed like it was damn funny, and it felt incredible to laugh, my throat burned raw and my sides ached from it, and like I said before, it was probably the rum.
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Images: SchneiderSvan (night in the city); Janis Wilkins, havanatimes.org (Fidel wall)
As usual, Patty’s extraordinary writing at its finest!!! Can’t wait to order the WHOLE book and hole up to savor every page!!!!
[...] Excerpts [...]
Humorous, intriguing, absolutely fascinating characterization and dialogue.
Thank you, Sir, for the kind words.