We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Wrecks

  The Cradleland

  Above All, A Family Man

  Man Oh Man

  The Spouse

  Forever

  We Came All the Way From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  For Diane, who made all the difference.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Felice Newman, Frederique Delacoste, and everyone at Cleis; Charlotte Sheedy; and Doug Sadownik (for making all the right introductions).

  Thanks, too, to Robert Boswell, Joan Silber, Michael Martone, Chuck Wachtel, Connie Porter, Karen Brennan, Jim Shepard, Charles Baxter, Mary Elsie Robertson, and everyone at Warren Wilson College.

  I am also grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, Corporation of Yaddo, the Rag-dale Foundation, Jeffrey McCourt, Marianna Murphy Kohl, Chicago Reader, Chicago Tribune, and Columbia College.

  Finally, I want to thank Melvin Plotinsky, Nena Torres, Nereyda Garcia-Ferraz, Gini Sorrentini, Susanna Ruth Berger and Tom Asch, Jorge Casuso, Maria Kostas, Donna Blue Lachman, Susan Nussbaum, my cousin Adriana Busot, my brother Mario, and Cathy Edelman, my own little Rock of Gibraltar.

  Wrecks

  I have to be sure I have the right insurance—that is, collision as well as liability. I simply can’t afford not to be able to pay for whatever car repairs I might need, and I’m afraid that sooner or later (and probably sooner) I’m going to be sitting in a mechanic’s waiting room, right there next to the Coke machine and the faded road maps, flipping through some weathered copy of Time or Popular Mechanics, waiting to be told what my insurance will and won’t cover.

  This is very important to me right now because I always have an automobile accident after a break-up, and Sandra, my lover of five years, just left me for some babe who lives in San Francisco, the promised land of fruit and nuts. We were one of those couples everyone envied—good-looking, funny, successful—so I’m still trying to figure out how this happened, and why. Sandra’s dark, jealous, and bird-like, as impatient and breathtaking as a nestling, and the new babe is tall and wooden. I know I shouldn’t dwell on it—it’s not good for me—but I know they don’t fit.

  Since Sandra moved out on me in order to pump up her phone bill and become a free and frequent flyer, I’ve been trying to take the bus and train everywhere—to work, to the post office, even to the grocery store, which I hate doing because, since I can’t carry ten bags of stuff with the same ease with which I can pack them into the VW, I end up having to do some shopping every time I leave the house. Since I’m trying to be environmentally conscious and use paper bags, which don’t have handles, this is doubly tough on the five block walk from the store to my apartment.

  The last time this happened was about seven years ago. It had been three and a half years of utter hell with Loretta, but I still couldn’t believe she’d really left, so in my grief and disbelief I wrapped my car around a tree in a south Chicago suburb. I did it the minute Loretta left for Los Angeles, a city in which no one is actually born but to which millions are drawn like moths to a fire. Loretta was lithe, a singer with an immense and angry voice. I’d always thought we shared a cosmic connection of some sort: after all, we fought and fucked like minks. But she said she had to go because she’d imagined women would be kinder than men, and my sarcasm was wearing on her sense of sisterhood.

  To make matters worse, after I’d wrapped my car around the tree, I refused to believe it was inoperable, so I did my damndest to start it, sending the fan blades tearing through the radiator, which had been pushed up a good six inches. The entire mess cost me around two thousand dollars, including the towing fee back to the city. I should have just chucked the car—a beat up mustard-colored Dodge Valiant—but I didn’t. I just kept going. So did Loretta, who married the corporate lawyer for Hughes Aircraft. They have two daughters now, one inexplicably named after me. I confess it does give me comfort: it’s evidence of sorts that I had an effect on that girl after all.

  Before that, when Doris left me for membership in a lesbian separatist living collective somewhere in the hills of Arkansas, I made a point of not seeing the steel post holding up the chain around one of Chicago’s lakefront parks. I knew Doris and I had problems living together—she smoked with the same fatal simmer of an arsoned building, leaving powdery ash sculptures everywhere—but it seemed extreme that my nagging should drive her to repentance in a place where no cigarettes, polyester, or dairy products are allowed.

  After Doris left, I’d wanted just to drive leisurely and miserably through the park, which was—wisely, I suppose—closed for the winter. I just wanted to get a look at the lake, frozen with the waves mid-roll. I knew they’d remind me of all those little ash tubes, gray and mindless, that Doris had left around the house. But I never made it to the lakefront. I ended up sliding on some ice on the road and sort of hopping onto one of the little posts that held up the keep-out chain, ramming the post through the transmission of my car and causing total vehicular loss. Ultimately, I didn’t mind so much. I hadn’t yet noticed car accidents as a post-relationship pattern, and I’d never much liked that car anyway, a green and white Gremlin that looked like a pimp shoe.

  To be honest, I think the whole accident/relationship thing really started after a brief affair with a former sports writer for the Chicago Sun-Times whom everybody thinks is bisexual but who is really a lesbian. She’d cover Bulls games by watching them in her peripheral vision on TV while lying on top of me on her bed. After she moved to Washington, D.C., to cover society happenings, I ran my old Chevy van into the line of taxis waiting across the street from the Sun-Times building, giving the domino theory a whole new twist.

  I don’t drive anything as lethal as a van now, but rather my more benign, if not just plain cartoonish, VW bug, one of the original Beetles, red and rusty, but still dependable. Of course, I don’t actually drive it much these days, since I’m convinced that getting behind the wheel will be eventually, inevitably, disastrous.

  The fact is, I can’t stay away from cars when I’m heartbroken. Even when I tell myself I shouldn’t drive, I end up hanging out at fancy used car lots, where they use terms like “vintage” and “pre-owned,” just staring at those fine machines and dreaming about getaways.

  A few days after Sandra left, I saw a 1956 vanilla-colored Porsche 356, the same kind of car in which Jimmy Dean spun right out of this world, and I swear I would have sold my mother to get it. But my mother’s dead, Sandra was gone, and with her, every technological gadget I might ever have hocked for more than a hundred dollars, so I didn’t have much with which to bargain with the devil, much less a car salesman. So I just balanced my two paper bags full of groceries and stared at the Porsche. I touched it a few times until, finally, one of the sales guys came out to the showroom and told me to go home. He said I looked like I was going to cry and offered to get me a cab, which he even paid for. That was very nice, but not as nice as driving myself would have been. The thing about cabs is that even if you’re rich enough to pay the meter, they still have their limits.

  And the idea after a break-up, of course, is to have no limits. I think that’s why I like the notion of cars when I’m going through emotional angst. They provide this very cool, very American answer to pain: Even if you follow all the right directions from Chicago to San Francisco, all you need is one wrong turn—one little fuck-up—and you wind up in Mississippi, where there are no lesbians. It’s so
inevitable that you may as well enjoy the ride—the wind in your hair; the truck stop waitresses who’ve always been curious but have never been with other women other than in their fantasy letters about threesomes to Penthouse Forum; the radio blasting away with great rock ‘n’ roll songs, then great tear-jerking Country and Western songs, and then, when the tinny static stuff comes on while you’re daredeviling through the swamps, you can always pop on a Philip Glass tape and think yourself really courageous.

  I’m no fool, though. I know all this romantic posturing about wide-open spaces, the adventurous South, and on-the-road possibilities; all these images and metaphors for freedom are inspired by men, jaded men like Jack Kerouac—that repressed homosexual who never really found love and died a pathetic mess of a human being. It’s all a cover-up for just one thing: desperation.

  I know from personal experience that, ultimately, no matter how many road maps I study, how many pairs of lacy underwear I pack for travel, how many times I tell myself that there are girls with Creole accents just waiting for me in New Orleans or Miami, all I’m going to do is drive around my ex-lover’s house and have an accident. Sandra may pine for San Francisco, but she only lives one block away from me now. That’s how crazy this is.

  Of course, I’ve seen a therapist about this but all I remember is that she recommended I not see Fatal Attraction, which offended me terribly because, as a lesbian and a feminist, I would never resort to that sort of thing. Instead, I drive around and around and around Sandra’s building, like a crazy wind-up toy that’s too wound up and careens off into the furniture. I always want to throw up, but I don’t—my stomach knots up and short-circuits the whole idea. It’s like everything else about her and me: one false start after another.

  We met through a mutual friend, a woman we were both crushed out on but who didn’t want either of us. It took Sandra and me two dates to kiss, which is pretty typical by lesbian standards but a little slow by mine. By the time we made it to bed, it was more formality than desire: we already knew we were completely incompatible and went through it, I think, just so we could say we had.

  Six months later we were both still prowling performing arts spaces and foreign movie houses as single lesbians. When we ran into each other again, we both seemed to glow with the right aura, kiss with lips that fit perfectly into each other’s mouths, and make love with complementary rhythms. At first, even though it was very nice, I thought that it would be not a casual affair, but a transient relationship; I just wasn’t sure we’d fall in love. But after another six months, even though I still had doubts about our romantic possibilities, she’d packed her little pointy boots, her Cuisinart, and her cats and re-settled them in my Uptown apartment.

  That didn’t quite work out, though. She wanted more closet space. She didn’t like the posters I had on the walls. She thought my Mexican rugs were cheap. So after six months we moved into another apartment, one that was ours from the start, in which no decision could be made without the other’s approval. It should have been suffocating, but it wasn’t. There was a funny comfort, an uncanny understanding to the way our furniture fit together and our clothes began to match.

  Of course, there still were little problems. I liked to stay up until the wee hours; she was up before dawn. I liked rock; she liked salsa. I liked sex in public places; she considered it an adventure to do it in our own kitchen. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, we began to behave in ways that said we wanted to be together for a long, long time: My clothes no longer rested on the exercycle, but got hung up at night; her dishes didn’t sit for days but got washed as soon as she finished her meals. I opened a savings account; she named me as her spouse on her American Express and got me a card.

  If life was too mundane to be heaven, it didn’t matter; it was heaven on earth, or heaven enough. We had a long, train-like apartment with so much light we had to cover our eyes when we woke up. And on Sunday mornings, sitting in bed reading the paper while drinking coffee and soaking in Sandra’s sleepy musk, I was as happy as I might ever have been.

  It’s true, I could never tell her about my weird Catholicism, or the way my heart hurt from pleasure sometimes, but I could confess to her my foulest fears, my most awful memories, and I knew they’d be safe. I don’t know what she couldn’t tell me, but I know no one had ever listened to her with quite the same rapture, or held her as fiercely when she was afraid. I know because she told me so, and to this day I believe her about these things.

  All of that changed when Sandra took a business trip to San Francisco. She has told me what happened during that week a million times now, but even though I know too well how one thing led to another, I still don’t see how—I don’t understand why suddenly we didn’t make sense, and why they did. She explained it by telling me she realized she wasn’t in love with me anymore, and that she hadn’t been for a long time. She talked about smoking cigarettes for the first time in years, and enjoying it; about walking on the beach; about going to bed at the same time every night with this new babe. She has told me far more than I ever wanted to know about what happened, but try as she might, she’s been unable to make me understand how the gears stopped working for us, how the machinery went rusty without our knowing, and how one day the motor simply wouldn’t turn over.

  When it finally happened—when it became inevitable—I thought that, after five years together, the splitting would be agonizing. I worried about all the everyday things I might have lost sense of; I wondered, really, if I might not walk into walls or the middle of traffic, like a mental patient who thinks she wants freedom but really wants only to be out of the dark and into the light.

  I feared the division of our possessions more than anything, not because they were so many but because they were so few and so precious. We were professionals, though, as efficient as the keenest of lawyers: cool, rational, shamelessly unsentimental. We went through the business of furniture without argument, and then we did the same with the dishes and kitchen appliances. After that, the few items of clothing that might have been debatable fell right into place with one or the other’s wardrobe, almost as if they—and not we—knew instinctively where they belonged. Her CDs and my CDs gathered in perfect, separate piles.

  Even the photo albums were simple to divide. We peeled back the plastic pages and plucked each image, one by one, laughing, and sometimes crying (actually, Sandra didn’t cry; she hasn’t cried once during this whole thing), remembering our trips to Santa Fe, and to Mexico City, and the good times in Tulsa. I was struck by how few pictures there were of us, but how many of her, standing beside this or that interesting tourist site; and of me, driving with that crazy look in my eyes, or leaning happily against the fender of a rented roadster. I always made us rent sports cars, no matter how inconvenient for luggage or sleeping, because there’s nothing like driving at night, very fast, very sure, in a car that does absolutely everything you want it to. I think it’s patriotic as hell. And I look corn-fed in those pictures, all of which she kept.

  When I visit Sandra now, her cats eye me as if I were some long-lost relative, funny uncle, or divorced parent. It takes them a while to remember me, and I never know if they’re reflecting her or acting on their own. I envy them nonetheless, their little brains, and that they get to sleep with her every night. The trouble is, most of the time—not all of the time, not when I’m out dancing with friends or watching TV—I still want her and our life back. I still want to go on long rides with her with the windows open, the radio blasting. I still want her to tell me stories, to fall asleep with her head in my lap while I drive. It’s true that I didn’t ever really know where we were going, but we were going, and it was steady, and it mattered. The trip itself was always as vital, as sunny, and as difficult as wherever we might end up.

  Now, whenever I drive by, I look up at Sandra’s apartment. I don’t stare. I don’t lunge out the window. I’m very subtle, the picture of calm. I check my gas gauge. I check my heat vents. I check my mirrors and hope no one has no
ticed that this is my millionth time around the block, and I’m wearing a groove into the street. Actually, I never have any idea of how many times I’ve gone around the block. I lose track; I really lose track. I get lost, not on the street but inside my own head. Then I get fucking terrified that someone will see me when I’m trying to be casual about checking my mirrors and that they won’t believe me, they won’t buy my act, and maybe they’ll call the cops or the neighborhood crime watch.

  I always imagine that I do it right, though: I reach outside the car to adjust my side view mirror, and then, right at that moment, I look up, casually of course, to see if Sandra’s light is on, if the cats are poised on the window sill. I hope that maybe, just maybe, she’ll pick that same moment to interrupt the flickering of the TV light with a few steps across the window frame, to the kitchen for more scotch or coffee, or to the bedroom to get her robe because it’s cold and she misses me, or maybe, just maybe, to come to the damn window to look for me because she knows—I mean, she just absolutely knows—that I’m here, adjusting my mirrors outside her window, and needing her.

  But, of course, it never works out that way. I don’t see anything, or if I do it’s all in a split second, an instant, that harrowing and fragile crack between the past and the future. I lose momentary control of the car, threaten the life of some neighborhood kid with the shrill of brakes and screaming car horns, and then drive as fast and far away as I possibly can—to the lake, to the Loop, to Kankakee—anywhere, just as long as I can hide my shame and panic when I get there.

  When Sandra first left, my friend Lourdes kept up my spirits by saying stupid things. “Women,” she declared, cozy in the bosom of a seven-year relationship with a woman who is both a cook and a carpenter. “You can’t live with ‘em, and you can’t live without ’em.” I thought this was particularly insensitive of her, kind of arrogant actually, but so blatantly dumb that it never failed to get at least one demented, disgusted laugh out of me.